New Book

Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora
Edited by Carolyn A. Brown and Paul E. Lovejoy
Africa World Press, Paperback
400 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1592213580, 2010.

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New Book

The African Diaspora in Asian
Trade Routes and Cultural Memories
By Shihan De Jayasuriya Silva
Edwin Mellon Press, Hardback
198 pp., ISBN-13: 97-80773436510, 2010.

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New Book

The Black Diaspora of the Americas:
Experiences and Theories of the Caribbean
By Christine Chivallon
Ian Randle, Paperback
230 pp., ISBN-13: 978-9766373962, 2011.

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New Book

Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora
Edited by Ana Lucia Araujo, Mariana P. Candido and Paul E. Lovejoy
Africa World Press, Paperback
308 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1592218202, 2011.

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New Book

Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas
By Robin Derricourt
Pluto Press, Paperback
256 pp., ISBN-13: 97-80745331058, 2011.

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New Film

Searching for Buxton
Communications Research Institute
William Penn University.

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Charles Orser has remained at the forefront of discussions of race in historical archaeology, and continues on this path in his latest book The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America. In this publication, Orser aims to bring the topic of race, and more specifically the process of racialization, to the center of the historical archaeology agenda in America. He argues for a specific framework guiding how archaeologists approach race, suggesting that we look at racialization as a structural process that has explicit connections to relations of power and control. Archaeologists must not only address this process in the past, but also engage with this structure as it continues to shape our experiences.

Historical archaeologists, in Orser's view, should explicitly engage in identifying and revealing how the process of racialization is materialized. In order to take on this role, it is necessary that we approach racialization through a structural framework, as opposed to a cognitive perspective. From this standpoint, racialization and racism "create action and encourage practice within a carefully constructed system of power relations" (p. 13). In order to "confront and engage" this process, he advocates for archaeologists to investigate the possible connections between capitalism, material consumption and racialization.

According to Orser, anthropology and race have a long interconnected history, but archaeologists lagged behind other social scientists in explicitly addressing racialization within their research. Recent research in historical archaeology, however, has focused on race and identity, the spatiality of race, and the development of race relations. Orser argues that those studies that have investigated race have largely focused on the history of African Americans, paying little attention to the construction of whiteness in America, and to racialization as it occurred beyond the Eastern Coast of the United States. Additionally, he endorses community involvement and reflexivity in order to deconstruct the race structure that persists today.

Throughout the first three chapters, Orser develops an explicit multi-scalar framework through which archaeologists can develop a more thorough and sophisticated understanding of the structure of racialized relations within America and how this structure was negotiated locally. In order to address race as an aspect of "epochal structure," according to Orser, it is necessary to deconstruct how racism was historically constructed within the American social system. Orser argues that racialization in America is directly connected to the "hierarchical structure of capitalist society" (p. 51). Epochal structures, in Orser's view, include "societal structures of inequality" (p.53) which are constructed of network relations, and these relations are enacted or performed in particular spaces and places. It is up to archaeologists, then, to investigate how places and materials reveal relations within the epochal structure.

Orser bases this 'model' on Bourdieu's conceptions of habitus, capital and fields. He sees the racial category as a kind of "embodied cultural capital," (p. 60) in that race becomes naturalized through becoming a part of ones habitus. In order to examine the process of racialization in the material record, archaeologists need to view consumption as occurring within a network of social relations. People will manipulate networks of relations through consumption within the structural constraints of their habitus. Our ultimate goal as historical archaeologists is to "discover ways to observe racialized differences in material culture generated during capitalism" (p. 69).

To demonstrate his approach to historic racialization in America, Orser presents two case studies. The first is an exploration of the Irish in New York, and the second focuses on the Chinese in California. Through these examples, he argues that racialization was not simply constructed on phenotype, but as exemplified by the categorization of the Irish as 'non-white,' incorporated factors such as educational rank and occupation.

Orser first focuses on the Irish in New York City, providing historical, documentary and archaeological evidence to investigate racialization in this context. In order to contextualize the archaeological study of an Irish Tenement in New York's Five Points neighborhood, Orser presents the historical evidence revealing the habitus of the immigrants from Ireland and also the epochal structures in place within the U.S. during the mid-late 19th Century. These epochal structures, according to Orser, were both social and politico-legal, involving the actions of social networks in developing anti-Immigrant sentiment and also the construction of laws and statutes to constrict the immigrants. The racialization of the Irish, according to Orser, began in Ireland, but was 'perfected' through the nativist movements in the United States. Using pictorial images and 19th century 'scientific' inquiry, Orser demonstrates how anti-Irish racialization was a part of habitus formation for non-Irish Americans. The racialization of the Irish in New York was most clearly materialized through the spatial segregation of the community within the city. Orser suggests that archaeological evidence, medicinal bottles in this context, should reveal this spatial segregation and the epochal racial structure that existed in America.

In chapter five, Orser uses both historical records and archaeology to present a case study in which he focuses on the process of racialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in California. Orser analyzes the materials recovered from the excavation of a Chinese laundry in Stockton, California to address how the national pursuit of the racialization of the Chinese in the United States is revealed through the material record. The bulk of this case study addresses the larger issue of Chinese racialization in America, which took place mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout the United States. Orser (p. 139) presents a variety of sources to show the "racialist habitus of the United States" during Chinese socialization, including pamphlets and books, United States Federal Acts and Treaties, and political cartoons. Orser then provides an overview of the negative treatment of Chinese laundries and launders in America, and reviews the findings of previous ethnographic/historic studies, including that of a Chinese community in Oakland, and one of the Chinese in Chicago. Finally, Orser provides a brief analysis of the material record from the Stockton site.

Within these case studies, Orser argues that racialization is a process in which individuals who are "collectively classified as white maintained control and authority over people perceived as nonwhite," but that it is also highly situational and negotiated on a local-scale. His detailed discussion of the history of these two groups, as well as his attention to institutionalized and structural racism as it developed in the United States is a unique contribution to the discipline, revealing the insight that historical archaeology can give towards understanding the nuances the immigrant experience.

Overall, this book provides a very useful vocabulary and framework through which historical archaeologists can discuss and investigate issues of race and racialization. This publication provides a 'call to action' for historical archaeologists to develop a more sophisticated and explicit discussion of race. While many of the ideas presented in this book are not novel concepts, as illustrated by Orser's own review of the historical archaeology of race and racialization, this discussion brings to light the surprising deficiency in attention to this topic in much of historical archaeology that persists even today. In particular, within the archaeology of the African Diaspora, it seems that the process of racialization is often a contextual observation rather than an explicit focus of investigation.

As Orser and others have pointed out, the racialized structure of the colonial and industrial world was developed as the institution of slavery progressed. Forming social relations around skin color and other phenotypic traits was a shift often associated with the rise of capitalist endeavors in the New World and associated economic benefits of slavery in the colonies. Institutionalized and structural racism was a situational and fluctuating process that developed over time to allow for the development and maintenance of power and control by the 'dominant' group. As archaeologists we are in a unique position to examine process of racialization associated with Africans and African Americans in the New World, through the material record, as it developed over time and across space. As much of our research takes place within local, small-scale contexts, we are also able to focus on the more particular expressions of this structure, as individuals and groups negotiated and resisted the epochal structures in place in historic America. Orser has provided a highly useful framework through which archaeologists of the African Diaspora can begin to more comprehensively address race as a central concern of our research, as it is materialized in the archaeological record.

Sylviane A. Diouf has written an excellent social history of the Clotilda and the West Africans who were purchased at Dahomey and illegally transported on the ship to Alabama in the summer of 1860. This voyage occurred more than fifty years after the Constitution prohibited American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Diouf's first task is to convince readers that the Clotilda Africans in fact existed. This is necessary because, from the Buchanan presidency to Hugh Thomas's recent The Slave Trade (1999), official investigations and historians have denied the existence of the voyage and the 110 Africans brought to Alabama. Before Diouf's book, most historians believed that the Wanderer, making a trip to West Africa two years earlier in 1858, was the last American slaving passage. To prove the existence of the Clotilda voyage, Diouf identifies individual Africans and locates their African communities of origin. She then presents histories of the Dahomey Kingdom and its hinterland to demonstrate that particular Africans could have been captured only from certain areas after the Wanderer's crossing. The result is a more complete picture of the process of transatlantic slavery and experiences and cultures of the people involved. By reconstructing specific African cultures and religions of enslaved persons, she demonstrates how these cultures helped sustain enslaved people during antebellum slavery and the transition from slavery to freedom after the Civil War.

More than twelve million Africans were forced to make the Middle Passage, but historians have identified only a few individuals and their African backgrounds. Historians accordingly know little about enslaved Africans' cultures of origin and how these cultures shaped their experiences in America. The most well-known account of an enslaved African transported to the Americas is the Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), but recently a scholar has questioned whether Equiano was even born in Africa. Thus Diouf's historical recovery of certain Clotilda Africans is very significant for demonstrating African experiences before enslavement. She argues that it was the Clotilda Africans' cultures and the memories of being free people in Africa that shaped their responses to living in the South as slaves: "Their transition from freedom to servitude and back to freedom highlights the aspects of their cultures that were most useful to them as individuals and as members of a free community" (p. 4).

Another important contribution of the study concerns Africans adapting to life in Alabama after the Civil War and through the first decades of the twentieth century. Diouf documents how the Africans successfully made the transition to freedom and how they maintained their identity as Africans and created their own community during Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation. In 1870, they established African Town on property that they purchased near Mobile. African Town, Diouf asserts, was the longest lasting black community in America and one that retained its ethnic identity longer than any other. Diouf attributes the success of the Clotilda people to having been free in West Africa.

Diouf bases her account on Alabama and national newspapers that reported on the Clotilda, narratives and interviews of the Clotilda owner and the captain, and interviews of Clotilda Africans and their children. Dreams of Africa is thus one of the few studies of transatlantic slavery that utilizes primary sources from the perspectives of both the slavers and the enslaved. Diouf also relies on writer and folklorist Zora Neal Hurston's unpublished manuscript based on two months of interviews with Cudjo Lewis, the last Clotilda survivor. Other sources include interviews of the Africans conducted by Booker T. Washington and local historians. Diouf places the Africans in the context of the historiography of the Dahomey region (modern Benin and northwest Nigeria), southern historiography, and Mobile history.

Diouf begins the story of the Clotilda people in Mobile by discussing the financial motives for enterprising individuals to engage in the illegal slave trade. Mobile, financially dependent on cotton and thus on slavery, was Alabama's "slave emporium." And Alabama's most lucrative business after plantation slavery was the domestic slave trade. As the center of domestic slavery shifted from the eastern seaboard to the Southwest with the expansion of cotton production, the domestic slave trade could not keep up with the demand for enslaved labor. Diouf also reminds readers that some of the strongest defenders of slavery were born in New England as was the Clotilda's owner, Timothy Meaher from Maine.

To make her case that the Clotilda Africans came after the Wanderer in 1858 and sailed from West Africa in 1860, Diouf describes 1860 as a boom year for slave trading in Dahomey. This was a change from the early 1850s, when Dahomey had signed a treaty agreeing to stop exporting slaves and agreed to only engage in the legitimate trade in palm oil. But palm oil did not bring as much profit to the royal house, and so in 1858, after increasing demand for slave labor in Cuba, King Ghezo resumed the slave trade. After his death in 1858, his son Glele intensified slave raiding into the interior of the Bight of Biafra.

Before enslavement, the Clotilda people were "Muslims and non-Muslims; farmers, traders, and fishermen; victims of kidnapping, raids, and wars" (p. 39). Diouf determines that most of the Africans were Yoruba or Bante from Benin. Bante was a town or market area where women usually sold agricultural products at market, which helps explain why the Clotilda women would become successful traders in Alabama after the Civil War. She makes the determination of origins by placing the Africans' descriptions of architecture, river names, distance traveled to the coast, community defense systems, and secret societies in the context of ethnographies and the new historiography on central African history. Much of her study focuses on the oral histories of Lewis, who gave the most interviews. His account of the enslavement process in Africa is one of only four such narratives by central Africans and is a valuable contribution to the study of African slavery and transatlantic slavery. Diouf's approach to locating the original homes of Africans should become a model for scholars attempting to retrace the social, cultural, and family backgrounds of enslaved Africans.

Diouf examines how the recently arrived Africans were initiated into slavery and how they related to American-born slaves in Alabama. Since African American slaves tended to denigrate the Clotilda people as "African savages," the Africans segregated themselves from other slaves on the basis of their African identity. Upon freedom, the Africans wished to return to their homelands. But as they could not find a way to finance a voyage to Africa, they tried to remain as independent as possible based on their African identity. Therefore, they attempted to recreate their lives as free African people in Alabama. With men earning wages at lumber mills and railroad yards, and women growing and selling produce in the market, they pooled their savings, and, in 1870, purchased land a few miles outside of Mobile that became African Town. Diouf argues that the reason they were able to accomplish economic independence with a degree of self-governing autonomy so soon after freedom was because of their shared African values and ethics: "The African tradition of collectivism was certainly a major part of the reason why shipmates were able to acquire land and housing early" (p. 155).

Once they established African Town, their experiences paralleled those of African Americans during Reconstruction and after. They converted to Christianity in the late 1860s, and, after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, they became American citizens, even as they continued to identify themselves as African. But even though they had achieved economic independence, and owned and governed their own community, African American leaders like Booker T. Washington denigrated them for clinging "to the memories and traditions of their savage life in Africa" (p. 181). By the 1930s, with the deaths of all the founding members, African Town lost its African character and become an African American town.

The greatest strength of the book is its broad theme of how West Africa influenced African American history. For this reason, it would have been beneficial to scholars for Diouf to have engaged with studies of African survivals and adaptations by Sterling Stuckey, Margaret Creel Washington, Michael Gomez, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Another minor quibble is that perhaps Diouf could have been more critical of slave raiding in Africa and such practices as ceremonial human sacrifice.

Nevertheless, this is an exceedingly well and creatively researched study that greatly contributes to the fields of slavery and African American history.

Julie Roy Jeffrey takes up the study of American abolitionists at the point where many scholars have left off. She focuses on reformers after 1865, examining the ways in which advocates engaged in a renewed debate with a nation inclined to forget, evade, or mythologize the recent past, eager to put sectional quarrels aside, and content to accept a menacing climate of racism in the interests of sectional peace. In the last third of the nineteenth century -- as in the second third -- abolitionists found themselves deeply embroiled in discussions about the experience of human enslavement, the meanings of freedom, the possibilities of equality, and the responsibilities of the Republic. The memoirs abolitionists wrote to engage in this renewed debate represented a double-edged return to the past. Purposefully, the writers presented historical accounts of the antislavery movement's origins. Tragically, reformers retraced earlier ground as a way to confront resurgent racial fears and resentments in their own time that echoed those of the 1830s.

The context for Jeffrey's exceptionally fine study rests in the scholarship on historical memory in the post-Civil War period. Building on works by David Blight (Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory [2001]), W. Fitzhugh Brundage (The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory [2005]), Mitchell A. Kachun (Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 [2003]), Nina Silber (The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 [1993]), and others, Jeffrey explores how the abolitionists' reading of history contrasted with a "reconciliation" version of the past, one that located the roots of war in abstract and idealistic political ideals rather than the grim calculus of slavery, celebrated the sacrifices of both Union and Confederate armies, romanticized the paternal care masters extended over presumably childlike slaves, and chastised "divisive" advocates of social reform who had brought America to such a bloody impasse. Jeffrey acknowledges that chronicles of bravery, honor, and racial hierarchy eventually prevailed in popular historical consciousness. But she reminds readers that efforts to shape the collective memory of the Civil War began as highly contested debates. Individual reformers and abolition organizations offered a range of autobiographies, institutional histories, short stories, images, and collective rituals that formed a "counternarrative" focused on the horrors of the chattel system, the calculating motivations of secessionists, the oppression of African Americans, the justification of reform, and the powerful forces arrayed against advocates of freedom (p. 21).

Jeffrey examines some twenty-five memoirs by reformers, arranging the works in chronological order and exploring how late nineteenth-century struggles over the meaning and purpose of the Civil War shaped the shifting recollections that advocates held of early nineteenth-century events. The study opens within the institutional base of abolition, examining debates between reformers who believed that Civil War amendments had fulfilled the campaign's goals and those who feared that racial prejudice would leave African Americans at risk of further degradation and dispossession. As antislavery societies ceased operations, reformers were left with little organizational support and turned to ruggedly individual means of continuing moral agitation. Samuel J. May's 1869 autobiography was one of the first efforts, setting the tone for many subsequent works by focusing on the national problem of race prejudice, Southern resistance to constitutional reform, and calls for expanded and strenuous federal intervention on behalf of freed people. Three years later, William Still's book, The Underground Rail Road, offered a potent antidote to racial stereotypes by foregrounding the work of black men and women in their own struggle for self-liberation. Early memoirs such as these commonly stressed the harmony of antislavery efforts and the varied but complementary paths taken on the road to liberation. Reformers' writings took a different direction in the 1880s as abolitionists tended to become more quarrelsome, reviving older debates about the relative merits of politically and morally based approaches to social reform. By the end of the century, however, as the nation witnessed systematic restrictions on black rights and escalating racial violence, the divisive tone of memoirs eased and surviving abolitionists addressed one another on more conciliatory and respectful terms.

Such a sweeping summary fails to do justice to Jeffrey's nuanced and thoughtful reading of antislavery reformers in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis of their memoirs touches on a wide variety of themes, exploring the different roles authors fashioned for themselves in reform activity, their thoughts on the possibility of moral progress in a modern age, and their responses to the historical amnesia they detected in American society. Jeffrey examines abolitionists who reevaluated the role of Abraham Lincoln in the work of emancipation, placed the work of antislavery in a gendered frame of reference, commented on the role of churches in the struggle for emancipation, and debated among themselves over the capacities of the people they had worked to free. In the case of reformers who provided multiple accounts of their abolition experience, Jeffrey explores revisions made in memoirs (as in her discussion of Mary Grew) and the comments advocates made on the historical reflections of their colleagues (in a section on Frederick Douglass).

The richest quality of Jeffrey's work rests in the multiple contexts through which she views her subject. The study deftly examines reformers' memoirs in terms of the personal experiences of advocates who had to deal with their own affairs, their livelihoods, their health, and, in several cases, their own financial sacrifice in order to publish works that would set the record straight on the work of abolition. Jeffrey also examines the writings from a literary perspective, focusing on memoirs as a distinct genre set apart by both critical norms and by popular expectations. In addition, the author examines the business of publication in the late nineteenth century, calling attention to influential periodicals and presses, the contractual arrangements made with authors, and sales figures for the volumes that reformers produced.

Throughout the study, Jeffrey takes a frank and critical view of her subjects. While acknowledging both the abolitionists' bravery (in the face of broader cultural resistance) and their energy (in terms of the endurance of their reform commitments), she recognizes that the memoirs under review seldom displayed literary flair, often revealed self-serving motives, and rarely reached wide audiences. The absence of vigorous abolition organizations after the 1860s weakened even further the reformers' ability to sustain interest and support in their campaigns.

Abolitionists Remember is an engaging and resonant work that suggests how reform communities have often focused their attention on the illumination of the past as a means of guiding the alteration of the future, recognizing recollection as a powerful form of agitation. The memory invoked in the arguments of advocates can commonly clarify, affirm -- and in the abolitionists' case -- compel the altered direction society should take. In this way, reform projects may be viewed as simultaneously retrospective and prospective, grounding the possibility of what might be on a careful recovery of what had been. As they revisited the origins of their reform effort, the subjects of Jeffrey's study stand not only as purposeful chroniclers of the past but also, in a sense, as some of the first "re-enactors" of the period, returning to the ground of their social commitments, retracing the route of their reform engagement, and reaffirming the necessity of their program for social change.

Two compilations of essays, "The Problem of Evil" and "African-American Activism before the Civil War," have recently been published. The first, edited by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, two of the leading scholars on American social history and reform, concerns the effects of slavery, racism, economic inequality, and American power on American institutions. Some of the nineteen essays are by scholars who have been defining the historical interpretation of slavery, race, and reform since the 1970s including Orlando Patterson, Ira Berlin, Stanley Engerman, and David Eltis, while others are by well-established and new scholars. Rheinhold Neibhur's work on the relation between religion and evil and David Brion Davis's work on the connections between religion, slavery, antislavery, and capitalism inform many of the essays. (Davis has become more interested in issues of religion and morality in his more recent work.) "The Problem of Evil" is wide-ranging in topic and time span. The first of the nineteen essays is Patterson's summary of his work on the philosophical nature of slavery and freedom in the ancient world and the last essay is Jack Holt's examination of how Dwight D. Eisenhower's faith informed his politics during the Cold War.

Putting together a volume on the implications of evil for the study of American history is a tremendously significant undertaking, especially in post-9/11 America. Contributing to the worthiness of this project are the superb introductory essays by the editors. Mintz writes the introductory essays to the volume and to parts 1 and 2, and Stauffer writes the opening essays to parts 3 and 4. While the fashion in American history writing has been for historians to pretend to moral neutrality, Mintz and Stauffer argue that Americans cannot move forward (nor by implication can they honestly contemplate the significance of 9/11) until there has been a moral reckoning with the American past. Mintz writes that "history without a moral dimension is antiquarianism" (p. 1). Their undertaking is modeled on German writers since WW II who have tried to come to terms with the implications of Nazism on the past, an undertaking called "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung." Mintz defines the word as the "wrestling with the demons of German history through reflection, remembering, and moral reckoning" (p. 1).

The editors chose the essays according to five criteria: the wrestling with a fundamental moral problem, the centrality of ideas or an ideology "to connect economic and political interests and the realm of ideas" (p. 2), the recognition of culture as involving contests for power, the placing of the U.S. experience into larger processes of modernization, and the relation of slavery to an understanding of modernity. Most of the essays contain themes prominent in history writing on slavery, abolition, reform, and freedom since the 1990s. By historicizing evil, these essays work to undercut the conservative American exceptionalism interpretation of U.S. history.

"The Problem of Evil" is divided into four sections. Part 1 on slavery consists of five essays ending with Robert Bonner's comparison of Confederate racialism to the scientific racism of Nazism. The antislavery section contains seven essays ranging in topic from William Casey King's study on the changing interpretations of sin and ambition in England and America before the American Revolution to Catherine Clinton's study of dominance and submission in the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.

Stauffer, a former student of D. B. Davis, writes the introductions to part 3, "Imaging Emancipation" and part 4, "Post-Emancipation America." Both essays are creative and original. In his first essay, he considers how slavery and race challenged American's millennial mission, and in the second, by referring to Mark Twain's story "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1899), he considers questions of power, self-righteousness and national delusion, and the telling of American history. Stauffer, referencing W. E. B. Du Bois, argues that whiteness became the basis of American morality and in the process blinded Americans to the immoral implications of race and economic disparity. This essay greatly resonates with undergraduate students and assigning it is a way of introducing difficult topics in survey classes. Parts 3 and 4 contain five and four essays respectively. The essays in part 4, by implication, consider America's moral quandaries in the aftermath of 9/11. For example, Michael Fellman looks at American efforts to subjugate (with the use of water-boarding) the Filipinos, Leslie Butler considers the implications of liberals endorsing WWI, and Ellen Dwyer traces the links between the psychiatric profession and racism in the armed forces in WW II (an essay that is even more interesting given the recent shootings by a Muslim psychiatrist at Fort Hood). This volume is strongly recommended as a companion book for survey classes on American history and for historiography classes for its insistence that history writing be morally informed.

Of all the fragments that comprise the field of global history, the past of the Portuguese-speaking world is one of the least well known. Indeed, knowledge of it among scholars in the Anglo-American or French traditions seems to exist in inverse proportion to the vast scale of the regions once held under the sway of Portuguese political or religious influence. Several reasons exist for this state of affairs, but the primary one is that there are few specialists with competence in the Portuguese language. A secondary, yet perhaps no less important, reason consists in the fact that the accretions of different European presences in Asia and a lengthy history of independence in Brazil have largely suppressed the memory of the Portuguese colonial legacy. Yet if there is one world region where Lusophone history cannot be relegated to a marginal status it is Africa, where the duration of the Portuguese presence from the fifteenth until the twentieth century has ensured that new scholarship must continually engage with the colonial legacy. Specialists who analyze the past in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea, Cape Verde, and elsewhere have recourse to a rich historiographical tradition. But there are few points of entry into this literature for those not trained in Portuguese, and even fewer for undergraduate students or scholars in other fields seeking terms for comparison. Malyn Newitt's new book therefore fills a considerable lacuna for those seeking to explore the documental legacy of the Portuguese presence in Western Africa.

The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415-1670 is the latest installment in a set of useful material rendered into English and accessibly priced by Cambridge University Press for the university teaching market. The book is a collection of translated excerpts of primary source documents related to the major areas of Portuguese influence along the African Atlantic coast from Morocco to Angola. The chronological frame spans the first half of the history of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, and the documents touch on aspects of politics, diplomacy, trade, and missionization. The order of the texts is more thematic than chronological, surveying related subjects in a coherent order and following the progress of Portuguese colonial expansion southward along the Atlantic coast. Newitt offers a succinct overview of the Portuguese presence in West Africa as a preface, where he indicates unifying themes (with organizing references) and sketches a general framework for understanding the collection. What is most appealing about this volume, however, is its depth of coverage. Equal attention is given to the early fifteenth century in Morocco, the later fifteenth century in Guinea and El Mina, the sixteenth century in Kongo, and the seventeenth century in Angola. The amount of space devoted to the North African conquests is especially important, since it offers the reader a series of contrasts between late medieval and early modern patterns of conquest and expansion.

True to its title, this book is a documentary history. The documents range from one paragraph to several pages. A brief illuminating essay that gives the context and identifies the individuals mentioned precedes each selection. References are given to the original sources in Portuguese, Italian, and German, typically in modern printed editions, but at times in archival collections. All of the documents have been translated afresh by the author. Thankfully, they have been done in fluid, modern prose, instead of the archaizing forms often used by translators to make the tone of their text sound more authentically early modern. Newitt also deserves thanks for his decision to avoid using early modern English translations of the selected texts, thereby sparing the reader the ambiguities inherent in Elizabethan or Jacobean prose. The selections in The Portuguese in West Africa are further annotated, perhaps a bit too sparingly to the taste of this reviewer, but sufficient for the didactic purposes of this volume. There is a short bibliography of related works, as well as books containing other primary sources in translation or in the original, and a glossary of Portuguese or African terms which repeats the information found in the footnotes.

The sources selected by Newitt present a range of historical voices from official court chronicles (Gomes Eanes de Zurara's works loom large in the early sections) to diplomatic correspondence (both to and from Lisbon and Rome), to missionary reports (primarily by Jesuits), and finally to colonial histories (Antonio de Oliveira de Cadornega's Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas [1680] and Filippo Pigafetta's Relatione del Reame di Congo [1591] hold pride of place). While there is a lack of female voices, there is no want for women in the sources. The book contains ample discussions of different regional societies, and the sources offer many vivid details of the African cultures and polities with which the Portuguese came into contact. Of all of the regions discussed, the core of this volume is devoted to the relations between Portugal and the Kingdom of Kongo, and the sources touch on matters religious, diplomatic, economic, and military over the period from the late fifteenth until the late seventeenth century. From the perspective of undergraduate teaching, this volume is most appealing for its insistence on European knowledge about the variety of cultures in West Africa; its depiction of the different modes of interaction between Europeans and Africans, whether peaceful, violent, or neutral; and its underscoring of the crucial role played by diplomacy throughout West Africa.

Newitt is a senior scholar of the Portuguese Empire and, in particular, Portuguese East Africa. His new collection of excerpts from primary sources represents yet another example of his long commitment to the historical profession. Not only has he written major histories of Mozambique, Portugal, and the Portuguese Empire, but he also has produced or collaborated in a number of sourcebooks which are ideal for teaching undergraduates and useful for scholars not trained in Portuguese. The Portuguese in West Africa is the companion volume to an earlier work entitled East Africa, published by Ashgate (2002), which was originally intended as part of the discontinued series, Portuguese Encounters with the World in the Age of the Discoveries, edited by John Villiers. That he pursued the publication of his new volume with Cambridge University Press is a testament to Newitt's commitment to his field.

The appearance of The Portuguese in West Africa provides an opportunity to consider this book in the context of other recent projects aimed at publishing Portuguese documents in English. Ashgate's was perhaps the most ambitious series, and it is a shame that the publisher did not follow through with plans for all of its projected volumes. The three that were printed are useful, if uneven in quality. The volume called China and Macau (2002), edited by Clive Willis, relies heavily on sources that have long been available in the Hakluyt Society's publications, and Newitt's collection on East Africa uses many documents previously translated by other scholars, notably, G. M. Theal's Records of South-East Africa (9 vols., 1898-1903), but also including sources rendered into English by E. G. Ravenstein and C. R. Boxer. A third volume, Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives (2009), was edited by Chandra da Silva, and primarily contains polished versions of translated sources from other edited collections. For this reviewer, the greatest flaw of the Ashgate volumes is their price: While they can be found in most research libraries, they are far too expensive to be considered for course adoption at the university level.

Thankfully, Cambridge University Press has realized that the expansion of "World History" as a component of university teaching has created a market for such teaching tools as primary source collections. There is an evident demand for the type of material presented in The Portuguese in West Africa, and Cambridge University Press does well to offer the book in paperback and at a reasonable price. Newitt's book pairs nicely with another refugee from the collapse of the Ashgate project, Stuart Schwartz's Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700 (2010), but that volume also relies on documents translated by others and regrouped without a concerted effort at standardizing names. One other volume worth mentioning in this context is the recent collection of primary sources edited by Peter Mancall, Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (2006). This last volume suffers from the fact that early modern English translations were used instead of new renderings of the sources, putting the burden on the reader to make sense not only of the English prose but also of the confusing terms used by early moderns to describe unfamiliar lands and customs. In sum, there remains a great need for collections of primary sources, in fresh translation, on the early modern Portuguese Empire. The most glaring need is a collection of documents focused on the core regions of the Estado da India during the five centuries of the Portuguese presence in South Asia.

Newitt's _Portuguese in West Africa_ is clearly the best of the recent collections of documents in English about the Portuguese presence in the early modern world. Instructors seeking to include materials about Europe's encounter with Africa before the eighteenth century will find coherent sets of readings here, as well as just enough context to frame effective discussions. And specialists in the history of Anglophone or Francophone Africa should also benefit from the readings on the Portuguese presence in Northwest and West Africa, along with useful bibliographic references. It is hoped that _The Portuguese in West Africa _will serve as an inspiration for other authors in the field of Portuguese history, and a further impetus for publishers to commission new volumes of accessible primary source collections in English for wide audiences.