Palm oil, known as dendê in Portuguese, is virtually synonymous with Bahian cuisine and Afro-Bahian culture, but despite its centrality it has received no serious study by historians or geographers. Case Watkins's new book remedies that problem. An engaging longue durée study of the introduction and development of Bahia's palm oil agricultural sector and its relationship to the African diaspora, Palm Oil Diaspora is also the work of a scholar intimately familiar with the Brazilian landscapes that he studies. Having researched the history of Bahia's southern coast and visited the small towns and some of the dendê farms that he examines, Watkins explains how the dendê palm arrived in Brazil, how and why it took hold economically and culturally, while also evoking the geography and culture of the Bahian towns where it primarily grows today. Watkins asks two overarching questions: How did Africa and Africans contribute to the Columbian Exchange? How did palm oil cultivation take hold and survive in Bahia? In the process, he joins the school of geography led by Judith Carney that argues that Africans contributed significantly to the Columbian Exchange, and he supports B. J. Barickman's arguments challenging the notion that Brazil's economy was based solely on a series of monocultural cycles—in the case of Bahia, cycles of sugar.Long known to be central to Afro-Bahian cuisine and culture but also now ubiquitous in worldwide industrial food production, the dendê palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is so common in coastal Bahia that it almost fades into the landscape, yet, as Watkins argues convincingly, it is native to West Africa. He opens the book describing how European colonization and the Atlantic slave trade led to dendê's introduction to the American tropics from the Caribbean to Brazil; he shows how, in Bahia, it became an essential ingredient in African and African-descendant agency and resistance. Overall, he argues, this agricultural sector, although rooted in the oppression of the slave trade and enslavement and subjected over time to denigration by state, federal, and international elites (agronomists, naturalists, economists, and development experts), managed to thrive and today occupies a recognized region of the state of Bahia where family farmers, including the descendants of escaped slave communities, continue to grow it.Watkins follows Judith Carney and others like Robert Voeks who strive to demonstrate that the Columbian Exchange was not simply a Europe-to-America phenomenon. Like these scholars, Watkins provides definitive examples of African agency and epistemology in the development of the environment that we today know as Latin American. Chapter 2 establishes dendê's existence in Africa and its importance to African foodways prior to the European colonization of the Americas. Watkins then documents its arrival in the New World via the Atlantic slave trade. Chapter 3 shows how dendê became embedded in Bahia, carefully taking us through the often-generic and usually vague terms for palms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Watkins then shows that slave traders encouraged dendê's introduction, cultivation, and commercialization in Bahia because familiar flavors helped the captives whom they brought from West Africa to survive the trials of the Middle Passage and adjust to their new enslaved lives in unfamiliar landscapes. Over time, as the following chapters show, enslaved, escaped, and freed Africans and their descendants began to actively cultivate and commercialize dendê throughout Bahia's coastal sugar and manioc districts. After the abolition of first the slave trade and then slavery, the international trade in dendê ended, but palm oil maintained its economic and cultural role within Bahia's Black community, both as an essential ingredient in Afro-Bahian cuisine and in candomblé. Dendê also became an essential ingredient in soap. By the twentieth century, US-based naturalists and agronomists had become interested in dendê, and at midcentury industrial entrepreneurs began to grow it. This led to a distinction between “industrial” and “artisanal” dendê, in which the latter term referred to that grown by small farmers with limited resources—in other words, the “traditional” Afro-Bahian growers (p. 239). Today, dendê continues to be the purview of both industrial growers and surviving Afro-Bahian growers, including those in communities designated as quilombos.The methodology for this extensive study is mixed, including traditional historical, anthropological, and geographic methods. In ten years of research, Watkins read widely and consulted postmortem inventories, customs and commercial records, and reports by foreign travelers and agronomists—traditional sources of history. He has also engaged in ethnographic fieldwork, especially interviews of small farmers who grow dendê. Additionally, he employed geographic methodology, walking the fields and forests of the region and then mapping the locations with GPS.This study explores an important economic and cultural sector that has not yet received the attention from historians that it deserves; Watkins shows once again that sugar was not the only agricultural sector essential to Bahia's economy, culture, and society. As much to the point, he has provided us with incontrovertible evidence of the environmental, agricultural, and cultural influence of Africa and Africans on the Americas.