Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation by Ikuko Asaka (review)

"European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation." Thus began Ecological Imperialism (1986, p. 2), Alfred Crosby's influential attempt to make sense of how Europeans had so successfully colonized what he called "lands of demographic takeover"—Canada, the United States, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, where white settlers demographically displaced native peoples. Crosby's explanation was that Europeans invaded these temperate places with potent biological allies such as disease microbes, livestock, crops, weeds, and pests that aided immeasurably in their colonizing success. For Crosby, these "Neo-Europes" were the products of a multispecies material biological imperialism that proved effective in places climatically similar to Europe. Crosby's intent was to disarm the chauvinists who still clung to fatalistic explanations about European superiority and to argue instead that European conquest was, to a degree, a biological accident. But his argument also obscured the moral culpability of settlers with a kind of biological determinism, one that spilled over to his treatment of other peoples. Four sentences later, Crosby offered the following generalization about those of African ancestry: "Black Africans live on three continents, but most of them are concentrated in their original latitudes, the tropics, facing each other across one ocean" (2). The implication was that this demographic situation, like white settler success in temperate regions, was also a product of environmental forces.

In her powerful new book, Tropical Freedom, Ikuko Asaka makes the opposite argument: that the racial homogeneity of North American settler societies was the product of ideology, not biology. Asaka argues that the tropicalization of African peoples was a discursive project of the age of emancipation, a concerted white effort to separate the spaces of Black and white freedom at a messy tropical-temperate border. White settler societies saw Black freedom as a problem to be solved by relocating large numbers of African peoples to the tropics, and by insisting that the tropics was the natural geography of Black freedom. As such, Tropical Freedom provides a vital missing chapter to the history of Euro-American tropical thinking, one that connects early climatic justifications of race slavery and plantation agriculture in the Americas with late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideologies of imperial expansion and tropical environmental conquest.

Tropical Freedom is a comparative study of the United States and Canada as settler societies during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Asaka compares US colonization efforts in places such as Liberia with a British imperial story that connects Canada, the British Caribbean, and British Africa (Sierra Leone in particular). Asaka also argues that the US-Canadian border became a dynamic transnational space of freedom, and she shows how African North Americans, a diverse and sometimes fractious group, resisted these tropical removal projects. Chapter one examines the early stirrings of emancipation during the American Revolution and War of 1812, and the emergence of an imagined racial geography of Black freedom that undergirded the normative whiteness of temperate settler projects. Chapter two looks at the fugitive slaves who fled the United States to Canada after British emancipation and who emerged as a distinctive group of British colonial subjects. Chapter three demonstrates how, by the 1840s, British imperial theorists had racially mapped Canada as a white settler space and the Caribbean as a space of Black labour. Chapter four examines how African American mobility in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law both served and countered the emergent ideology of tropical racial exclusion, while chapter five argues that African North Americans developed their own oppositional ideas about the relationship between race, climate, and the geography. Finally, chapter six examines how the association of Blackness and the tropics shaped responses both to emancipation in the US South and to settler policy and practice in the US West. Asaka argues that, with the ultimate failure of African American removal, US...