This remarkable study, which won the 2013 French Historical Studies book prize, opens with the capture in the Senegambia around 1788 of a young woman later known as “Rosalie, négresse de nation Poulard.” From St. Louis, Senegal, she was transported to Saint-Domingue, where she was enslaved and sold to several households, although in this period and place “slavery was not necessarily a permanent status.” Yet, the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath cracked open new possibilities and dangers—a make-shift manumission document and flight to Cuba—followed by a Rosalie Vincent's probable return to Haiti. Between 1793 and 1803, she was freed, entered into a union with a French national, bore a child, and became a refugee. Furthermore, her daughter Élisabeth eventually reached New Orleans, where in 1822 she married the freeman and carpenter Jacques Tinchant.

In highly original and compelling fashion, Scott and Hébrard trace and untangle across three continents the many histories of this West African woman and five generations of her descendants. The authors adeptly combine individual or collective “micro-histories in motion” with the fallout from global struggles that framed destinies: trans-Atlantic revolutions, abolition and anti-racial campaigns, and changing configurations of empire. The family saga concludes with a gripping narrative of the fate of Rosalie's Belgian great-great granddaughter, Marie-José Tinchant, who was arrested in 1944 for involvement in the French Resistance, dispatched to the notorious Ravensbrück prison, and killed there in March 1945. Ironically, a post-World War II conceptualization of race (and heroism) prevented Marie-José's admission into the privileged category of political, as opposed to racial, prisoner, and so her descendants were until very recently denied the full honor and compensation accorded to those enjoying the title of political prisoner. One of the major arguments threaded throughout this utterly fascinating account is that bureaucratic documents have power to give liberty and dignity, or mobility, or conversely to fashion opposite outcomes for the lives of individuals, families, and communities.

Freedom Papers resonates deeply with Emma Rothschild's highly-praised The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011) which follows the shifting fortunes of the Johnstone family, eighteenth-century Scottish slave owners, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, imperial officials, and opportunists who scattered across Europe, the British Empire, and beyond. The most obvious differences between this lineage and the creole Tinchant family are that the Johnstones were free, white members of a socially ascendant class, who generated an accessible and coherent body of evidence, including a hefty cache of collected family letters. Nevertheless, reconstructing the Johnstones' trajectories also set Rothschild off on a chase after widely dispersed records.

Scott and Hébrard faced more daunting problems of evidence, which are addressed in a final section entitled “Acknowledgements and Collaborations.” It constitutes their own logbook of travels, travails, and serendipitous encounters as they tracked sojourners, the Tinchants and many others like them, across unstable landscapes of socio-racial differentiation. For historians, their work represents a model of truffle-hunting archival research interlaced with the hang-glider perspective of world history. So Freedom Papers is as much about the navigations of the authors and their subjects of inquiry as it is about claim-making and social mobility or vulnerability, and the role that documents of various kinds played in these processes.

Comparing documentation for people on the move, we might shift our gaze from West to North Africa and the Mediterranean, where in 1798 Napoleon's vast expedition moved against Egypt and the Nile Valley. That same summer Tunisian corsairs raided the islet of St. Pietro, off the southwestern coast of Sardinia, one of the last attacks of any magnitude in the central Mediterranean. Together with treasures from the local church, the corsairs carried back to Tunis a large number of villagers, including women and children. One of these women eventually gave birth to Ahmad Bey b. Mustafa (1806–1855), who ruled Tunisia from 1837 to 1855 as tenth ruler of the Husaynid dynasty. Ahmad Bey proved unusually devoted to his mother, whom he consulted regularly on matters of state; court officials referred to him as “the Sardinian.” In the Ottoman Mediterranean world, Ahmad Bey's mother followed a path shared by some fortunate slaves, both male and female. The trajectories of the Sardinian and Senegalese women during roughly the same period are intriguingly comparable.

We do not know the circumstances of how the Baya (wife of the bey or prince) drew the ruling family's attention, converted to Islam, and was manumitted; she was, however, legally married to the ruler. Even the daily existence of her childhood in the Husaynid court and harim (women's quarters) remains opaque since the chroniclers did not normally narrate the private lives of princely or notable women. Nonetheless, Islamic court records prove that the dynasty's women held, bought, and sold often-extensive properties. And the harims were multi-generational and multi-racial households where the line between the enslaved and free domestic was not always firm. Large parts of Rosalie's past, too, remain obscure. Color and race, as constantly reconfigured in the Atlantic world, and Rosalie's modest social origins, as well as her largely involuntary physical displacements, made piecing together her story difficult. Yet Rosalie's life reveals a kind of social mobility not unlike that of her Sardinian counterpart.

In 1816, “white” or European slavery was ended in the Mediterranean, although clandestine traffic persisted. Between 1840 and 1846, Ahmad Bey, the son of a Sardinian former slave, banned the African slave trade and consequently slavery itself in Tunisia, although here, too, clandestine trans-sea commerce in now “illegal” African and Black Sea slaves endured. One might be tempted to explain the divergent social paths of these two women by religion—Islam—or by the fact that Rosalie was African and black and Ahmad Bey's mother was “white,” although Mediterranean island folks, while Catholics, were not necessarily considered “white” (admittedly an anachronism) by northern Europeans in this period. In both Atlantic and Mediterranean “systems” of slave holding we detect the mutability and malleability of color, race, and legal as well as ascribed status, in specific times and places, within the larger envelope of human mobility and individual navigations. Until now, historians have been largely content to contrast something called Islamic and/or Mediterranean slavery with the Atlantic or New World, looking for and finding difference. Scott and Hébrard's rich study beckons us to search for unsuspected similarities, for the clarity of mutability.