Bouki Fait Gombo

The banks of the Mississippi river have long been recognised as the heart of the American south, with all that that implies. A painful history of plantation slavery grounded in cotton, indigo and rice production characterised the region from its settlement by European colonists in the first half of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War. The condition and transformation of this environment has been studied in many excellent books such as Walter Johnson’s recent River of Dark Dreams (2013). However, the processes of intercultural exchange which underpinned the economic and social transformations of the region have only more recently become a focus of enquiry. Ibrahima Seck’s new book offers an important contribution to the understanding of the intercultural histories of the American south. Professor Seck is the Senegalese-born director of the new Whitney Heritage Plantation Museum, and his book is grounded in decades of research on both Louisiana and Senegambian history. Melding a discrete microhistory to the macrohistorical forces that shaped the evolution of plantation slavery and slave societies in the American south, Seck asks his readers to reconsider their approaches to the African cultural contribution to the formation of New World societies. By matching the cause and effect of the economic process with the histories of both the plantation owners and the people who worked to make them wealthy, Seck shows how specific African and American spaces were connected

Archaeology · Economic history · Ethnology · Geography · Settlement (finance · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History

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