In framing this project, the editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade describe the experience of the urban Atlantic for Africans as one of ‘forced cosmopolitanism and desperate cultural adaptation’ (6). The eleven essays in this collection explore the history of African and African-descended populations in Atlantic port cities, with an emphasis on how these peoples experienced enslavement and freedom in the eighteenth century. In Part One, ‘African identities in Atlantic spaces’, the essays focus on Ouidah, Freetown, and Bahia, demonstrating how the evolution of various identities played out in the context of freedom and urban growth. Havana, Cap Français and Kingston are sites for the examination of agency in Part Two, ‘The sources of black agency’. Part Three focuses on the forging of autonomous spaces in and around cities, despite the heavy burden of enslavement. These essays take the reader to surprising sites, exploring how African-descended people tried to forge their own spaces aboard the ships sailing between British Caribbean ports, in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and in the raucous taverns of Luanda. In ending with Lisbon and Mexico City, the essays in Part Four look to the experiences of those enslaved in cities that are relatively separate from plantation economies, and to the contemporary silencing of narratives of African populations that seem to have disappeared. The volume ends with a bibliographic essay surveying the existing literature on slavery studies in the Atlantic world.

In analyzing how Africans and their descendants not only experienced, but also shaped these port cities, these essays address two broad, interconnected themes. First, they question the diversity of experiences too often flattened as ‘urban slavery’ (and rendered distinct from its rural and plantation counterparts). Second, they also probe our understandings of what an African city was or could have been during the waxing and waning of the transatlantic slave trade.

What made a city African in the eighteenth century? Although geography is an important marker, the essays on the coastal African cities reveal the heterogeneity of the urban experience. In Ouidah, this diversity is embodied spatially, and characterizes the growth and development of different residential quarters for Africans and Europeans alike. This perspective casts the idea of a ‘forced cosmopolitan’ in the new world in a strange light, as if many of these African peoples in the Americas were experiencing urbanization for the first time (6). If cities are imagined as social spaces where power is exerted, then the significance of the European population and its political control in, for example, Luanda, changes our understanding of this urban area as being simply an African space. Even across the Atlantic, this question resonates in cities such as Lisbon and Mexico City where, at times, African-descended peoples actually outnumbered Europeans.

The essays make a larger point about the multiple configurations of urban slavery. Cities became places where enslaved peoples had to find ways to live, die, escape from, and even come back to. While the historiography may tend to emphasize the divide between rural and plantation economies and being enslaved in cities, the essays here establish how the idea of urban slavery itself requires deconstruction. In some cities, enslaved and free Africans often relied on the connections between cities and plantations; around Cartagena, for example, marronage was crucial to the urban slave community (and vice versa). Dying in these cities was nearly as important as living in them. In Mexico City, we see examples of the careful thought given by brotherhoods to planning funerals and other death rites.

The editors ask if the size of these Atlantic cities mattered. They did. Earlier scholarship has made maps of the volume of Africans who were transported between ports across the Atlantic Ocean ubiquitous. Without a single map of the Atlantic world, this collection makes it that much harder to visualize the proximity and spatial relationships of these cities, and without quantitative data that compares estimates of populations sizes, it is also more challenging to imagine the comparative scale of the populations under consideration. Finally, from the perspective of the African edge of the Atlantic Ocean, any conversation about ‘black capitals’ should at least emphasize Elmina, Lagos, or Saint-Louis.

In sum, this much needed collection is an important update from books such as Peggy Liss and Franklin Knight's 1991 collection Atlantic Port Cities, and David Anderson and Richard Rathbone's Africa's Urban Past from 2000. However, despite its scope, several questions remain, especially about the roles of women of African descent in the Atlantic world. New work on African-descended populations in New Orleans and Havana by scholars including Rashauna Johnson and Guadalupe Garcia continue this conversation.