West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba

This admirable study contributes to a revisionist approach to the study of the Atlantic world by merging the details of slave resistance in Cuba and Brazil with revolutionary transformations in West Africa. ... Barcia's powerful argument raises important questions that will lead to additional discussion worth reflecting upon. * Paul E. Lovejoy, New West Indian Guide *
In this slim but impressive book, Manuel Barcia takes a different path, focusing on the military background of the enslaved Yoruba and Hausa slaves and looks at their impact in Cuba as well as Brazil. * John Thornton, Journal of African Military History *
Barcia's book is a very valuable study in a new research field which can be recommended sincerely to colleagues and students. * Dr Ulrike Schmieder, Leibniz University of Hanover, Reviews in History *
impressively researched and argued ... [this book should] be welcomed as making new contributions to the field ... show[s] that slaves were active in assessing their own situation and were probably far more aware of what was going on internationally than anyone ever gave them credit for. * Tim Lockley, Slavery & Abolition *
serious and precise ... intelligently beyond the traditional scope of the monographic study, offers new and promising avenues for interconnected research ... [this book] aims to demonstrate that practices of slave resistance in the Americas were not traces of a "survival", but rather a continuous adaptation which is an extension of their [African] history. * Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Politique africaine [translation] *
remarkable ... Barcia demonstrates great originality in using, in part, archival sources from Brazil and Cuba towrite African history. In so doing, he provides amodel for future scholarship. Sources for pre-twentieth century African history are relatively scarce, but Barcia shows thatwe can learn much by examining documents in the Americas ... move[s] us well beyond our decades-long obsession with comparisons between slavery in the US South and all other places [and opens] up new possibilities for future comparative histories and tell us much about slavery in two parts of the Americas that received tremendous numbers of enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century. * Walter Hawthorne, Atlantic Studies *
Barcia has done a fine job of matching up large and complex literatures and of plotting a novel path for understanding the interconnected nature of Yorubaland, Hausaland and the Americas in the nineteenth century. * Toby Green, English Historical Review *