Caree A. Banton, More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvii + 362 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.99)

More Auspicious Shores tells the story of 346 migrants who sailed from Barbados to the West African republic of Liberia between April and May of 1865. Caree Banton situates this important migration—which was the largest single voyage of West Indians to Liberia—within postemancipation struggles for Black freedom and citizenship on both sides of the Atlantic. She makes a compelling argument that the Barbados-Liberia connection was a key nexus for the transnational politics of race, nation, and empire in an age of struggles for Black freedom and anticolonial sovereignty.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many of the free Barbadians of color who would one day board the Brig Cora were part of a decades-long struggle for civil rights. Banton spends perhaps a bit too much time on these late slavery Barbadian politics, given that this history has been previously analyzed in the writings of scholars such as Jerome Handler, Hilary Beckles, and myself. Nevertheless, More Auspicious Shores adds new and significant dimensions to this scholarly conversation. In particular, the book’s analysis of correspondence between the American Colonization Society (ACS) and would-be emigrants in Barbados offers novel contextualization of the island’s African emigration movement. Banton illustrates how and why Barbadians became so important to the ACS, exploring how the possibility of Barbadian emigration to the West African republic fit into, and transformed, debates between African American and white abolitionists about Black emigration to Africa. She shows that “Barbadian emigration to Liberia expands the scope of colonization to the post-1865 period, a time when some scholars had viewed the ACS as defunct” (p. 143).

At the heart of Banton’s narrative are multigenerational and gendered stories of what freedom, Pan-Africanism, and Blackness meant in the lives of Barbadian-Liberian freedom-seekers and their descendants. Particularly poignant is the story of the Barclay family, led by Anthony Barclay and his wife Sarah Ann (née Bourne), the daughter of successful free Black Bridgetown merchant London Bourne, who had been born in slavery. Banton notes that Barbadians’ “British racial subjectivity,” their prior experience of emancipation in Barbados, and their commitment to middle-class respectability marked them as a challenge to the dominance of the Americo-Liberian élite. The Bourne-Barclay family’s engagement in Pan-African politics left political legacies that stretched into the twentieth century in Barbados and Liberia. This is especially well presented in Banton’s analysis of Anthony and Sarah’s son Arthur Barclay, Liberia’s last foreign-born president and, as a founder of the True Whig Party, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Liberian politics.

In addition to published primary sources Banton has consulted a range of archival documents, including Liberian church records and an impressive range of newspapers from Barbados, Liberia, and the United States. Her deep dive into the ACS records includes a list of the names and occupations of the 346 migrants aboard the Brig Cora, and correspondence between Afro-Barbadian emigration advocates and ACS representatives that reveal rich, individual stories of transatlantic freedom-dreams and experiences. Liberian correspondence and speeches illustrate the role of Barbadian-Liberian public officials in the complicated struggle to defend Liberian independence during and after the Scramble for Africa. At the same time, Banton critiques Barbadians’ own Western-centrism, painstakingly demonstrating their commitment to a vision of Liberian statehood based on diasporic colonization and marginalization of Indigenous Africans, supposedly in the name of antislavery. As she puts it, Barbadians sought to “earn citizenship by civilizing and Christianizing natives, thus serving to draw them closer to the ideals of the state” (p. 252).

More Auspicious Shores is perhaps hampered by a tendency toward repetition, of both the author’s own arguments and the arguments of other scholars. Additionally, Haiti haunts this study much as it haunted the long age of emancipation. Banton’s work misses opportunities for deeper analysis of Haiti’s legacy in shaping pan-African consciousness for Liberians. As a free Black republic, Haiti loomed large in Afro-Barbadians’ imagination as Liberia’s forerunner. Liberian politicians were surely aware that Haiti faced similar threats to its sovereignty and was scapegoated by white elites in order to undermine Black abolitionism, radicalism, and republicanism across the Atlantic World. Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to emancipation-era history in the Caribbean and Africa, and successfully presents the story of these Barbadian migrants as a vital chapter in the long formation of the Afro-Atlantic world.