I picked up this book on a visit to New Orleans, wanting to learn more about what has made the city such a unique place. The title seemed apt and initial skimming piqued my interest. I didn't realize that it would focus almost exclusively on the colonial or antebellum period, nor did I expect the many discussions of African musical traditions and how they played out in places such as Cuba and St. Domingue. That said, I think it is a very good examination of the many social and musical forces of the period that set the framework for New Orleans' evolution. Understanding this "world that made New Orleans" (particularly the different colonial regimes, their slave codes, and the effects on people of color) explains much of why New Orleans has always been more of a world city than a Southern one. ( )

Really comprehensive, really nuanced and readable and well written. Only problem was the scope? I wasn't sure why it cut off when it did but the last chapter about post Katrina NOLA was so good I wish that the whole Bokk was longer. I'd read anything this dude writes honestly so like it's telling that my only complaint was I wish there was MORE ( )

I was both frustrated and inspired by The World That Made New Orleans. I am convinced that amidst all of Sublette's unqualified conjectures and bitter diatribes, there is a truly valuable historical contribution here. Unfortunately, it is perpetually undermined by an informal tone and leaps of faith that seem to ask too much of a critical reader. Who was this book for? Digressions on the etymology of the word funk, an entire chapter dedicated to anti-Jefferson apologetics, and various unsubstantiated claims of musical congruity from the Caribbean islands to New Orleans seriously damage an otherwise thought provoking account of the historical milieu that existed during the creation of the influential American port city.

If viewed as a strict history, the book is poorly executed and largely unsuccessful in constructing a coherent and well supported argument, but I believe this book is better read as something else. Sublette’s book might qualify as a treatise—a lengthy speculative and interpretive essay on New Orleans and its various strands. Many sections of the book devolve into polemics and diatribe. While never directly stated, his argument seems to be that many factors in the world amalgamated to create the singular city of New Orleans, ranging from multinational colonialism, Caribbean revolutions, and a unique relationship to the social rights of African-American slaves. Many primary sources, some quoted in surfeit, are presented to support this hypothesis, though many of his main arguments about the details of New Orleans culture are unsubstantiated by these primary sources. More often than not, the cultural details of places like Santo Domingo and Cuba are given and the reader is asked to assume that the details must have been similar in New Orleans based on the “inevitability” of cultural exchange due to close proximity and constant trading between the islands and the city. In addition, attempts at interdisciplinary scholarship simply become distracting and convoluted. In fact, I’m not even sure if some of his material is interdisciplinary or just plain off topic. All of this criticism is valid only if one views his work as historical scholarship. As a speculative examination of the various networks that had an effect, however oblique, on the culture of New Orleans, it is quite expressive and certainly interesting. However, I would argue that historical conjecture should only occur when overwhelming historical evidence is present. In Sublette’s case, a simple introductory chapter explaining his intention of exploring the various reticular networks that came up when studying the roots of New Orleans’s culture and interpreting them within the larger global context of the city would have eased some of the frustration I felt when reading this book as a history.

The World That Made New Orleans is a passionate albeit discombobulated attempt to create a synecdoche where the world surrounding New Orleans is used to represent a specific rendering of that city. Sublette doesn’t so much prove New Orleans to be a globalized city as much as assume it to be so. When the record is silent regarding New Orleans’s contact with the outside world, he assumes that the contact most likely continued undocumented. Sublette oversteps the role of the scholar in interpreting a lack of primary source information, seeming to simply insert what he assumes to be true, because it can neither be substantiated nor disconfirmed.

For example, he claims that that the Kongos “were the strongest single influence on African culture in the New World” and that their legacy “permeates the popular music the world listens to today.” No footnote, no proof. He may be right, I don’t know. What’s certainly true is that claims like this have to be backed up. One statement this broad with no supporting evidence can completely undermine an entire piece of scholarship as far as I am concerned. Later, he claims that in order to know what the Kongo culture in New Orleans was like, “all we have to do today is visit Cuba. . . . The island still lives and breathes explicitly African culture, and perhaps the most influential of those traditions is the Kongo religion." Again, no footnote. Herein lies the problem: we are to believe this culture exercised an inordinate amount of influence, not only in New Orleans, but throughout the African Diaspora; yet to prove it, we are told to simply visit Cuba, where perhaps this culture exerts the most influence. I'm open to the theory, but I'm obliged to require some sort of substantial evidence. The burden of proof is with the author, not the reader. ( )

POSTCARD FROM NEW ORLEANS

Every street here has its own soundtrack. I can't walk along Royal without hearing ‘One last walk down Royal Street…same old blues, sad and sweet…’ playing in my head. I can't go for a drink on Burgundy without visions of Tom Waits growling ‘Arm in arm down Burgundy, a bottle and my friends and me…’ Everything here is a song, and songs pound out of every shitty overpriced barroom in the Quarter, blues, jazz, funk, drums improvised from upturned buckets.

On Bourbon Street (‘There's a mooon…over Bourbon…Street’) I find a country bar where the bar-stools are topped by real saddles. I mount one, with some difficulty, and drink sazeracs while I watch a three-piece burn through the Hank Williams songbook. TV screens around the bar are showing commercials for rifles and other firearms. In the corner they have one of those mechanised bucking bronco things, and halfway through ‘I'm a Long Gone Daddy’, some girl in a Saints T-shirt gets up and starts riding it, and then, apparently enjoying the crowd reaction, removes her shirt and bra. Conceivably this was for aerodynamic reasons, since she really clung onto that thing for an impressive amount of time.

It is gloriously trashy, and so is the rest of the district. I am Instagramming shots of the neon signs as fast as I can take them – Boogie Woogie, Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler, Reverend Zombi's House of Voodoo. I build my days around the food, a series of catfish po'-boys, blackened tuna, crab gumbo, red beans and rice. In Pat O'Brien's, where the central fountain is on fire for no good reason, I drink the obligatory hurricanes, which taste like very alcoholic flat Dr Pepper but kind of nicer than that sounds. A sober-looking middle-aged couple, dressed for dinner, come out of a posh seafood place, cross the street, and walk into the Hustler Barely Legal Club. I assume this name means that the women working there are young, although I do entertain the possibility that the dancers all have ten points on their driver's licenses, or green cards up for renewal.

If I had thought about it for more than a second I'm sure I would have realised before now that Bourbon Street is not named after the American liquor, but after the French dynasty. More surprising is to learn that New Orleans itself is not – as I had imagined – named in memory of the early settlers' hometown of Orléans, but after the Duc d'Orléans, who was Prince Regent at the time. There is a surprising amount of French here, still, what with the beignets and lagniappes and banquettes. But the French were only the first wave: perhaps the key thing that made New Orleans so unlike any other American city is that

Louisiana had what amounted to three colonial eras in rapid succession: French, Spanish, Anglo-American. Moreover, each colonial power that ruled Louisiana was associated not only with a different European language, but with a different slave regime.

And these Europeans weren't necessarily (as Donald Trump might have put it) sending their best – France originally used Louisiana as a penal colony. ‘To say “Louisiana” in the France of 1719,’ according to Sublette, ‘was more or less the equivalent of saying “Siberia” in twentieth-century Russia.’ They made a special effort to send women, because the colony had been so male-heavy when it was founded – so thousands of convicted prostitutes were sent from France, branded on the shoulder with a fleur-de-lis.

The languages now are thoroughly mixed together, their origins often disguised under multiple layers of translation. Signs on Royal Street remind you that it was originally the Calle Real. A guy I interviewed called LaBranche turned out to be from a German family called Zweig – their name was simply translated into French on arrival in the nineteenth century.

The area was settled as a strategic port for the Mississippi, which it remains – but in every other way, it's a strikingly inappropriate place to build a city. Driving along the 17th Street canal until I hit Lake Pontchartrain, I stand by the new pumping station and look out over the city. The lake, the canals, the river – New Orleans is basically defined by its water. More than one person describes the city to me as being like a bowl held in a basin of water: the slightest breach in the levees, or rise in water level, and the water will rush in and fill up the city, which is still sinking at a rate of an inch and a half a year.

That's what does the damage. Katrina in 2005 didn't actually do that much damage to the town, as a storm – the problem was that the levees broke, and the city simply filled up with water. That's why they've spent so much money on this new pumping facility, which just went online: the operations manager tells me proudly that it can pump out the volume of an Olympic swimming pool every 3.8 seconds.

The cemeteries, of which there are several either side of the road as I drive back into town, have a preponderance of above-ground mausoleums – the water table is so high that bodies buried underground are washed away within a few years. Death is, as people often remark, quite a visible presence in New Orleans. (There's a Museum of Death next to my hotel.) I associate this with the local voodoo tradition, which grew from West African religions and was then shaped by an influx of Haitians, which was a huge event in New Orleans's history.

Sublette's treatment of the Haitian Revolution is one of the best things in the book: he shows it to be the formative event of its time for the entire region. Thousands of refugees from Saint-Domingue – Creole landowners, slaves, and free blacks in roughly equal proportions – streamed over the ocean, first to eastern Cuba and then, when the French were evicted from there in 1809, over the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. For future generations, this would become a foundational myth – an archetypal story of independence, for Afro-Louisianans, and of paradise lost for white Creoles. ‘The ghost that haunted New Orleans was the ghost of Saint-Domingue.’

The multicultural swirl of influences, the music and food, the friendliness, all make for a very enticing atmosphere. ‘Aw, you goin' home, baby?’ says my Uber driver when I confirm I'm heading for Louis Armstrong International. ‘I won't say goodbye, 'cause I know you'll be back!’ I didn't want to say goodbye either. ( )

The opening was great and then it turned way too academic for me. I was expecting something more conversational in tone. I had to skip large sections in order to get through it. Someone needs to write a great historical fiction book about New Orleans. This book was very dry and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. So disappointed because I love New Orleans. ( )