Explores the intertwined histories of Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Although separated by an ocean, both cities were founded during the early French imperial expansion of the Atlantic world. Both became important port cities of their own continents, the Atlantic world as a whole, and the African diaspora.

"An invaluable, unusual book born from careful, well-organized, sustained collaboration among leading scholars from Senegal, France, the United States, and Canada. It helps put Africa into African-Atlantic Studies."--Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

"This is a conceptually ambitious Atlantic history that takes a looking glass approach to illuminate the trajectories of two port cities/slave societies in West Africa and North America. France provided the point in common and the starting point, but the beauty and the importance of this volume is that the French empire, while remaining tethered to these explorations of Saint-Louis and New Orleans, recedes from the foreground. It is a dazzling model for approaching the inherent challenges--and the pay-off--of conducting comparative history."--Sophie White, author of Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana

"A thoughtfully assembled collection of deeply researched and finely crafted essays, this book showcases what it takes to produce cutting-edge Atlantic World history. Important intersections and divergences in paths taken by two French colonial cities, spanning vast distance across time as well as space, are featured up-close through a rich array of methods and subjects"--Daniel H. Usner, author of American Indians in Early New Orleans: From Calumet to Raquette