THE URBAN HISTORY ASSOCIATION AWARDS HONORABLE MENTION TO SLAVERY'S METROPOLIS

Jackson Award committee's citation:

Slave economies fueled urban growth and the evolution of most – perhaps all – American cities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Rashauna Johnson's book, Slavery's Metropolis, carefully maps this history for New Orleans from 1791 to 1825, and in the process offers insights into the urban geographies of empire, race, and power. Johnson persuasively argues that enslaved peoples moved through transnational and global spaces while also being profoundly unfree. This "confined cosmopolitanism" is at the core of the book's explanation of urban racial order, and it is a weighty contribution to our collective understanding of slavery and cities. Johnson's impressive archival work and solid grounding in theory make this a masterful book on all counts.