Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World ed. by Cécile Vidal (review)

In this superb collection of eight finely crafted chapters, plus excellent introductory and concluding essays, Vidal has compiled a well-conceived volume that examines Louisiana from the perspective of recent Atlantic-world scholarship. The volume focuses primarily on Louisiana’s colonial period, when Louisiana belonged to the French and then to the Spanish New World Empire (and partly to the British Empire). Although a couple of the chapters extend into the early nineteenth century, the essays mostly concentrate on the eighteenth century and on the French and Spanish colonial experience.

The volume construes “Louisiana” broadly, but it centers on the lower Mississippi Valley—in particular, the area that would become the modern state of Louisiana. Moreover, although genuinely global in scope, the chapters are also attuned to particular and local histories. Likewise, although wide-ranging, both geographically and conceptually, each of the chapters addresses a specific topic. The introductory and concluding essays—by Vidal and Sylvia R. Frey, respectively—place the chapters in their larger historical and historiographical contexts and highlight the volume’s broader themes.

Although the authors address a host of issues and questions relevant to current Atlantic-world studies, the origins and development of the concept of race, and the construction of modern racial categories, in all of their complexity and nuance, are clearly central to the volume. Conceptions of race and race relations differed under French, Spanish, British, and American rule, and they continued to evolve during each distinct period. Yet something amounting to the modern idea of race always remained essential to Louisiana society. Moreover, all of the chapters show that even though local conditions and circumstances were integral to the development of notions of race in Louisiana, these notions could not be understood without reference to the wider Atlantic world and to the different metropolitan centers that variously ruled Louisiana.

Based on extensive archival research as well as on a close, indeed meticulous, reading of the sources, the chapters are also firmly rooted in the vast secondary literature. The footnotes alone are a goldmine for both recent and older scholarship on colonial Louisiana. All of the chapters can be considered, broadly speaking, social or cultural history, but certain of them also incorporate concepts from demography, historical geography, economics, linguistics, ethnography, and cultural anthropology. The authors also succeed in maintaining considerable analytical and theoretical rigor without, for the most part, descending into jargon. Whether Louisiana, for all of its diversity and complexity, can indeed be considered, as the subtitle maintains, the “crossroads of the Atlantic world” is debatable. Would any place fit that description? But this excellent volume will be of undeniable interest to scholars of the Atlantic-world experience.