Thomas Ingersoll presents a clearly-written account of New Orleans in its first century. This is no easy task. Building on the work of Peter Wood and Alan Kulikoff, Ingersoll sets out to overturn conventional scholarship that paints colonial New Orleans as a place of “Mammon”—a city of illicit sex and vice. Instead, the author contends that New Orleans “was marked by a remarkable degree of continuity over time,” and that “Manon”—greed and avarice—characterized the city’s growth under the French, Spanish, and United States regimes (p. xvii). Further, New Orleans existed in a unique context of “urban setting and plantation” life (p. xv) and “was indisputably North American in character, not Caribbean” (p. xix) Finally, “the basic character of society was the same in New Orleans as in Wood’s South Carolina, Kulikoff’s Prince George’s County, or anywhere else where the labor of black slaves was the mainstay of the economy” (p....

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