Historicizing Race

Abstract

for blacks, at least in the mind of whites in North America and the British Empire, became increasingly confined to tropical zones as the nineteenth century progressed. For reasons that might have been explained in more detail, the climate was deemed to be more suitable for emancipated slaves in particular places, such as Liberia and the Caribbean, than the temperate environment of North America. The politics of settler expansion in Canada and the United States reinforced this view and envisaged colonization of the continent by independent, property-holding, white families in a discourse that excluded blacks. By the 1840s, from West Africa to Britain to Canada to the United States, government officials, politicians, newspaper editors, and boosters associated black freedom with specific geographical spaces. So powerful was this association that Abraham Lincoln worked hand-inhand with the British in formulating plans for colonization in Chiriqui (Panama) and, later, in British Honduras during the Civil War, plans that remained in play long after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Free blacks in North America vigorously contested this discourse and presented convincing counterarguments that rejected biological essentialism and tropicality. Each chapter focuses on debates surrounding attempts to lure African Americans and African Canadians to work on plantations in Central America and the Caribbean or to become landholding farmers or tenants in Trinidad, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Despite sustained rhetoric and inducements to entice relocation, these schemes proved remarkably unsuccessful, in large part because of opposition organized by figures such as Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Samuel Ward. However, public debates about race, space, and labor nurtured a powerful narrative marginalizing black freedom and agency. Asaka has visited archives not often consulted in conjunction with one another to complete extensive research. Her evidence is gathered from the papers and the pamphlets of AngloAmerican abolitionists; the records of antislavery organizations, as well as of the American Colonization Society; government documentation from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Canada, and the Caribbean; newspapers; and first-hand accounts of black settlement in Upper Canada and Nova Scotia, including Canadian Church and School Society reports. The transnational scope of this project is impressive and makes the monograph distinctive. However, the author strains a little too hard, at times, in arguing that British and American whites—in contrast to the very careful categorization of blacks in different places, “white” is treated as an amorphous, all-encompassing identity—adopted climactic determinism in similar, if not identical, fashion. In deliberating the fate of freed people, tropicality was just one of a number of factors, most notably race, labor, and the law, that might easily tack onto a racist agenda or play into the hands of employers short of a workforce. Further evaluation of the relative importance of climactic determinism will be stimulated by this book. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny Tropical Freedom’s central contention that “slavery’s legacy helped make freedom a racially defined geographic concept in the United States and British North America” (203). It is an important work that will appeal to scholars of Anglo-American abolition, colonization and settlement, hemispheric studies (particularly of race and space), and colonialism and, above all, to those interested in free blacks across North America.