[A] compelling book.American Mediterranean is a model of effectively deployed interdisciplinary method. In service to his larger arguments, Guterl plumbs the complex depths of traditional sources like newspapers, personal correspondence and travel accounts, more surprising archival materials like the creolized fashions worn by Louisiana plantation mistresses, and even the racialized iconography stamped on southern currencies (his analysis of these money aesthetics was one of the book's highlights for me). Guterl is at his best when engaged in close textual readings. His enlightening and elegant exegesis of Martin Delany's 1859 radical antislavery novel, Blake, or the Huts of America, for example, shows convincingly how Delany unveiled "the planter's sense of slavery" as "cosmopolitan and global, and prospering.outside of the authority of the nation-state." .American Mediterranean is a beautifully written, inventively argued study, the kind of infectious book that makes one think, and raises a lot of interesting questions.

What Guterl has given us is a worthwhile study of how one national group of slaveholding elites imagined this wider transnational polity.