This book is a study of Black religion and its intersection with empire. It starts where Albert J. Raboteau began his classic, watershed study of African American slave religions – with the rise of Afro-European commercialism in West Africa in 1441. When Raboteau composed his history of Black religions in the 1970s, the terms “Black Atlantic” and “Atlantic world” were not in currency. Yet, the history of scholarship has vindicated Raboteau's periodization and the geographical purview of his narrative frame. He realized that the study of African American religions could not be contained by the time and space of the United States of America. As Charles H. Long has demonstrated in his scholarship, moreover, what is conveniently termed “African American religion” is always already constitutive of a diasporic formation of peoples within and beyond Africa whose subjectivity is rooted in racial Blackness. Long has repeatedly emphasized that the study of African American religion must be conceived through engaging with the Atlantic world instead of being constrained and controlled by the idea of the United States. The specific historical formations that have constituted African American religion have been derived through transnational networks and global linkages of trade, politics, and religious exchanges. The same holds true for White American religion. Scholars of White American religion have usually begun their narratives across the Atlantic – typically starting with Europe during the 1400s. Although their focus has usually veiled the significance of Africa, they have nevertheless found it necessary to tell their story as an Atlantic account – Sidney Ahlstrom's “European prologue” is a case in point.

To speak of the Atlantic world is to speak of Atlantic empires, although not in a reductive sense. Given the long history of studying African American religions through their relationship to slavery, it is now time for a study of Black religion that explains the deep ties to the architecture of empire – by which I mean the political order of governing through the colonial relation of power. I examine Black religion and colonialism in multiple Atlantic geographies, including the Kongo Kingdom, Liberia, and the United States. The phenomenon of US colonialism, however, is the most pivotal for this book.