and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. x, 260 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). Editors Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann have put together an excellent collection of essays on the history of Germany's connections to the black diaspora their book, and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914. The book's strength lies the fact that it is not centered on the twentieth century. It demands that we tie transnational connections between people of African descent and German-speaking Europe to an earlier time and place. What we have long understood as twentieth-century phenomena (black soldiers on German soil; black entertainers German culture) are nothing of the sort; these encounters--and German responses to them--belong to older historical discourses. The advantage to covering pre-WWI German-speaking Europe for a project such as this is that it encourages specificity. Because the majority of essays this collection concentrate on Germany before it existed as a unified nation-state, the book gives us more nuanced and highly contextualized portraits of black-white encounters on German-speaking lands. In this volume we find regional histories addition to global ones, micro-histories of black musicians at a Baroque court Bayreuth placed side by side with a century-long history of black American travel. For example, her chapter, Ambiguous Duty : Black Servants at German Ancien Regime Courts, Anne Kuhlmann demonstrates the diverse opportunities available to blacks within and outside German courts the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that permitted them to lead different lives. Local cultures at different regional courts made it possible for blacks such as Anton Wilhelm Amo to be potentially upwardly or downwardly mobile. Paradoxically, the other strength of this volume comes from the seven centuries-long timeframe the editors constructed. Because the book spans such a long time period, the reader can zoom in to local stories and also zoom out to see larger shifts over time German perception of blacks. For example, the authors effectively illustrate the evolution of language depicting people of African descent from the thirteenth century to WWI. Whereas the medieval and early modern eras German speakers labeled people of African descent Moors, by the nineteenth century that word had been replaced by the transatlantic term, Negroes. This switch, the editors argue, represents an unfortunate downgrading of the position of people of African descent German life. While connoted brave warriors, Christian saints, and the riches of Africa, the term Negro, they write, alluded instead to a trading commodity; a childish, cheap, and unskilled hand (p. 3). In Part I, called Saints and Slaves, Moors and Hessians, the authors demonstrate how shockingly different and sometimes egalitarian German treatment of blacks were prior to the Enlightenment. In their chapters examining medieval and early modern German artistic representations of blacks, Paul H.D. Kaplan and Kate Lowe encourage us to look beyond the category of exoticism to instead consider how an image of a black saint or a black slave functioned German courtly life. …