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This unique book on an overlooked and important aspect of the Age of Exploration can’t seem to pick what it wants to be. Is it an economic history? A political history? Or (least of all) a cultural history? Perhaps Giraldez presupposes a reader with more foreknowledge of the topic than I have, which is fair, but I often found myself lost in the lists of figures and officials. The inclusions of laws was extremely helpful and interesting but their contents were poorly explained. I wanted to read more about the Magellan exchange, revealing my own biases. I wanted to read more about interactions with the Chinese and Filipinos. I wanted more than figures and names, which disrupt the narrative and delay analysis. I think this book is part of a crucial project but for the uninformed reader and perhaps the informed reader as well, it falls short in terms of analytical content.

In order to better understand the history of slavery that I will be teaching from 1450, I decided to read this book on Roman slavery both to inform myself historically and to learn more about a system that is often compared to American chattel slavery as being more humane. This book is the perfect read for an undergraduate or armchair historian looking to learn about the basic ins and outs of Roman slavery. It is written simply though with important detail, and Joshel is always forthcoming about the shortcomings of her sources and when she is presenting speculation. This honesty is a valuable tool to both the beginning and advanced scholar, as it demonstrates the importance of reading against the grain. My one qualm is that Joshel did not place Roman slavery in the context of a more inter-regional or global slave system. It would have been nice to learn more about where these slaves came from. Otherwise a neat little read that demonstrates strong scholarship and a brief but rich understanding of the subject matter.

Because I plan to use this book to help construct a lecture on the role of slavery in global history, I was a bit disappointed that more of the essays did not explicitly place Indian Ocean slavery in a global context. What the essays did do is prove the vibrancy and variance of slavery in the world of the Indian Ocean, moving away from a focus on transatlantic slavery as the sole model of slavery. For those looking to use this book in a global context, as I am, Matthew S. Hopper’s “Slaves of One Master: Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire” provides a wonderful exploration of how transatlantic trade effected slavery and trade in the Indian Ocean. Working with transatlantic texts and the essays in this volume, it is also possible to draw comparisons with transatlantic slavery even though these comparisons are not openly discussed in the text. Though it doesn’t meet my needs exactly, I think it’s still a valuable work on a slave trade that doesn’t receive the attention it necessarily warrants, that also unveils a complex world of freedom and bondage.

The best way to approach this book is as a starting point. Allen’s goal is not only to prove that European slaving took place in the Indian Ocean between 1500 – 1850, but that it was intimately related to the more popularly studied transatlantic slave trade. He proposes a world system of slavery. The book is strongest when Allen is exposing the European role in the Indian Ocean’s slave trade, and he resists the trap of simply recounting what he found in his sources, though he does generate an amazing amount of statistical analysis. He proves his argument most convincingly when he traces the evolution of abolitionist thought in the Indian Ocean, linking it to similar developments in Europe. Allen is the first to admit that there is much work to be done on this subject, but this book does a great job of opening the door to future scholarship on the link between transatlantic and Indian Ocean slavery.

A well-researched if depressingly Eurocentric account of Latin American history. A more thorough and balanced work would have spent more time exploring the interactions between the indigenous, European, and African peoples that Eakin claimed to be the foundational forces behind the shaping of Latin America. Instead we get chapters focusing solely on Europe and European conquerors with little detail on other perspectives and experiences of the development of Latin America. What’s present is detailed and insightful, but a huge part of the shaping of Latin American is missing due to Eakin’s focus on the European side of the story.

When historians write about slave labor, they most often make the claim that slave labor varied with time and place. In the case of this book, slave labor is meant to include both the laboring slaves did for their masters as well as the laboring they did for themselves in order to take part in the (independent) slave economy. Reading this book, the authors of each included essay paint a picture of slave labor that looks very much the same: slaves worked for their masters and then slaves worked for themselves in ways that operated so similarly that each essay blended almost identically into the others. Perhaps these similarities speak to the a paucity of sources available about slave labor, particularly the independent slave economy – surely a great deal of reading against the grain is involved. Or perhaps the plantation systems of the Americas were structured so similarly that they bred similar labor regimens. Perhaps slaveowners developed networks of communication and experience that led them to oversee the development of slave labor in similar ways. Perhaps the movement of slaves internally promoted a share expectation of what made up plantation and independent labor. Or perhaps the editors were not careful enough to select essays that would actually show the variety of claimed slave experiences with labor.

All that aside, this book is very useful in instructing the uninitiated reader in the ins and outs of slave labor. But the more informed reader might look elsewhere for more differentiated information on the subject.

The best thing about this book, which in my mind definitively proves the Civil War was one fought over slavery, is when Oakes makes the point that, whereas the Union’s PURPOSE may have been to reunite the Union, the CAUSE of the war was due to increasingly untenable conflicts over the institution of slavery. The North elected a president whose goal was to strangle slavery to death in the South, so the South seceded in order to preserve their class and labor system, based around slavery, and the political importance of its extension into the territories.

Oakes gives a detailed but completely understandable and very legible account of the laws that went into forming slave policy in the Union, including critical constitutional debates over the meaning of property and the way war powers granted by the Constitution allowed the Union to confiscate property. He traces the evolution of emancipation laws into abolition laws and ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment, navigating the labyrinth of policy without losing the reader along the way.

While deftly researched by all the contributors to this collection, Slavery Hinterland leaves much to be desired. The focus of the essays appears to be on proving slavery played a role in the European hinterland instead of going beyond proving this point and exploring HOW it effected the hinterland. With a universal narrow focus on the people of the hinterland who participated in the slave trade in some way (mostly through economic exchanges involving goods used in the slave trade) valuable insights on the way this trade may have effected people/culture/economics/politics living in the hinterlands in lost. This may be due to a lack of sources, but other authors of slavery in traditional and non-traditional areas have done reasonably good jobs of constructing histories out of sparse sources. A valuable project that falls short of its goals (proving that players from the hinterlands had interactions with and thoughts about the slave trade while failing to prove that they had more than limited effects on the population at large) this work may benefit being turned into larger/longer studies that examine not just those great men/women involved in the trade but the way their involvement effected the hinterland.

While clearly thoroughly researched and repeated with rich detail, this book might have been more accurately titled “The Slave Trader,” as it’s really about the technicalities of the process of the slave trade and those who oversaw this process. Very little space in the 800 pages are given to anything that might be considered as being written from the slaves’ point of view, though to be fair the author does acknowledge this is due to the lack of sources available on this perspective. It often reads as a very long list of actions taken by slave traders, and more information on the culture of the slave trade would have been welcome. A valuable resource for those seeking to understand the ins and outs of the European side of the trade, but lacking in other dimensions.