Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850 – Felix Brahm (Editor), Eve Rosenhaft (Editor)
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.
