These volumes were assembled as a tribute to historian Suzanne Miers, who has produced an impressive number of influential books and scholarly articles about slavery and slave systems. She is, perhaps, best known for Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives Footnote ³ and The end of slavery in Africa,Footnote ⁴ which set the stage for debates that continue today. With examples from particular African societies, the collections questioned the applicability of Western models of slavery to non-Western places and suggested a new model that emphasized the incorporation of slaves into (rather than their exclusion from) their masters’ central institutions. Further, like much of Miers's scholarship, the collections explored the unique vulnerabilities of women and children slaves and the ways in which their experiences in bondage differed from those of men.

Each of the contributions to Women and slavery advances our understanding of the particularities of female bondage at different times and in different parts of the world. When taken as a whole, the chapters challenge the stereotypical image of slaves as men who worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. They make clear that, most often, the purpose of slaving was, as Miller states, ‘the capture and retention of women’ and that, over the world's history, most slaves have been females (vol. 2, p. 286). Although in most societies free men controlled political and economic institutions, women slaves often played central roles in their masters’ politics and in the economies of the households of which they were a part.

Each volume of Women and slavery contains a preface and introduction that provides historical and theoretical context. The first volume consists of fifteen chapters grouped into five parts; the second consists of twelve chapters grouped into five parts. Most of the groupings are topical and encourage readers to make comparisons over time and space. With the exception of two historiographical essays (Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson's ‘Re-modeling slavery as if women mattered’ and Miller's ‘Domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women’), the chapters are case studies of slavery in various parts of the world.

In this short review, I cannot do justice to the many themes that link Women and slavery's wide-ranging essays. One set of questions with which many of the contributors grapple centres on why slave women featured prominently in most of the world's slave systems. The volumes make clear that women and children were vulnerable during raids and in wars and could often be integrated into masters’ households as wives or junior members. But what did women do for those who held them in bondage? Did slave women's roles differ from those of free women? Did men seek out female slaves because they could bear children and/or provide sexual favours? Or were women slaves first and foremost labourers – producers? Or were they valued for other reasons?

In her essay, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch addresses these questions in an overview of Africa in the nineteenth century. In this period, she argues, social and economic transformations made women's lives so difficult that ‘statuses of free and slave women were not very different’ (vol. 1, p. 55). Most free and slave women performed the same duties for men, marriage marking passage into something often indistinguishable from slavery. Further, she suggests that women slaves in Africa were not valued as much for their reproductive functions (or for sex) as for their productive functions – for their ability to perform domestic tasks. Her conclusions dovetail with those of Richard Roberts, who uses innovative records – divorce cases in early colonial Sudan – to show how French efforts to end slavery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced significant new strains on societies and economies. When slaves chose to leave households, husbands demanded that others made up labour shortfalls, creating great burdens for ‘free’ women.

Other essays put more emphasis on the reproductive functions of slave women in particular contexts. In a fascinating comparative history of societies in Africa and Asia, Martin A. Klein makes a compelling case that the harem was not only – and not centrally – an institution established to meet the sexual desires of elite males. Rather, harems were where slave women bore the next generation of male leaders. That is, some harem slaves were valued for their ability to reproduce. However, relatively few harem women bore their masters’ children, harems, generally, being places where princes received leadership training (often from sophisticated women), elite males relaxed, and rulers found trusted (and female) confidantes. Jan-Georg Deutsch also considers slave women's reproductive functions. Using data about female slave pricing in German East Africa, he shows that, in the early nineteenth century, female slaves up to twenty years of age were more valuable than males of the same age. This points to the possibility that masters wanted young females for their present or future capacity to bear children.

Other articles, too, raise comparative possibilities over time and space. Kirsten A. Seaver examines female slavery in the medieval Norse Atlantic, exploring the nature of Viking raids, why Viking warriors targeted females, and how slave women were integrated into their masters’ households. She emphasizes that, while slave and free women performed many of the same productive tasks in Viking households, free women had legal protections that slave women did not, which often made their lives very different. George Michael La Rue explores how the tremendous number of deaths (mostly of African slave women) from plague in Egypt in 1834–5 created a labour shortage that led to large raids into Sudan for more slave women to perform productive tasks – work in fields and households. Focusing on South Africa, Fred Morton demonstrates how Boer slave raids targeted adults for death. Boers seized African children, Morton argues, because, in the Boer patriarchal household, there was no place for African adults. African boys tended Boer cattle and girls worked in houses. Boers arranged marriages for their slaves when they were in their late teens, couples continuing to work in quasi-service to masters. In a separate chapter, Sharifa Ahjum advances our understanding of South African Cape slave women by using psychoanalysis to explore the impact of paternalism on their psyches.

Timothy Fernyhough finds that, in nineteenth-century Ethiopia (as elsewhere in Africa), female slaves significantly outnumbered male slaves. Female slaves were valued, first and foremost, for the labour that they performed, but also for the ‘sexual gratification’ that they could give their masters and for ‘their reproductive capacities to father children’ (vol. 1, p. 219). Campbell also focuses on the productive capabilities of women slaves in a study of nineteenth-century Madagascar, where most slaves were female. Though some slaves ‘induced abortions and practiced infanticide’ to avoid bringing children into a state of perpetual slavery, most sought to ‘secure a niche within the dominant society for themselves’ by forging linkages with slaveholders and, ultimately, assimilating into society through a process of ‘acculturation’ (vol. 1, pp. 241, 251).

The ‘acculturative’ or ‘integrative’ aspects of slave systems outside the West have received much attention since Miers and Kopytoff's Slavery in Africa. Contributing to the historiography in a fascinating essay in volume two of Women and slavery, Barbara Krauthamer explores how Creek Indian social structures allowed for the incorporation of runaway slave women from Savannah and Charleston. Since the structures of Creek communities were not wholly different from those of some African communities, life with the Creek was not for African women fugitives ‘entirely alien or unsatisfying’ (vol. 2, p. 120).

But in her essay, Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan raises a cautionary note. If women slaves in many parts of the world sought incorporation into their masters’ households, they, too, often struggled to create spaces where they could exercise some independence. With sources from archaeological digs, Jordan explores the lives of slave washerwomen in South Africa's Cape Colony, showing that the streams in which they washed clothes together were where slave women forged ‘informal networks of reciprocity’ apart from those of the society that held them in bondage (vol. 1, p. 351). In his chapter, Philip J. Havik also raises a cautionary note, challenging scholars not to think of slave systems the world over as necessarily being controlled by men. In the Guinea-Bissau region of Africa in the nineteenth century, he shows, powerful female slavers controlled both male and female slaves, some of whom were sold into the Atlantic, others being directed to produce export crops.

The global patterns explored in volume one of Women and slavery stand in stark contrast to the patterns that emerged in American slave systems after 1500. As Miller points out in his broad and interpretive essay, slavery in the Americas was ‘massed and masculinized’, which led, he argues, to the emergence of particular ‘racialized imaginations’ of African men as ‘dark specters’ (vol. 2, p. 208). Historians have long debated why more African men than women ended up in the Americas. In his chapter, Paul E. Lovejoy argues that Muslim leaders in parts of West Africa were reluctant to sell women into the Atlantic for ‘cultural, political and, above all, religious’ reasons (vol. 1, p. 276). But other factors – such as American planter preferences – were important too.

Turning its attention to the Americas, then, volume two of Women and slavery focuses on slavery in a context quite different from that of volume one. Nonetheless, many themes from the first volume continue through the second. Among these is a focus on slave women's sexual reproduction. In separate essays that engage a long-running historiographical debate, Kenneth Morgan and Richard Follett note low birth rates among slave women and argue that the nature of work regimes and diets played a larger role in limiting female slave reproduction in Jamaica and Louisiana (and, by extension, much of the Americas) than did slave women's choices. Morgan writes that evidence does not support the conclusion that slave women often practised ‘self-abortion, abstinence, or infanticide’. Slave women did not ‘oppose breeding as a political statement’ (vol. 2, p. 46). This conclusion begs a close comparison to that drawn by Campbell for Madagascar, where, he argues, slave women sometimes induced abortions and killed their own infants.

Other chapters in both volumes use innovative sources to reveal details about the lives of slave women. Several contributors turn their attention to the representations of slaves in a variety of literary genres. Katrin Bromber examines images of female slaves in Swahili texts; Henrice Altink explores pro-slavery writers’ changing thoughts about slave women's sexuality in Jamaica from 1780 to 1834; and Felipe Smith delves into changing depictions of slave mothers in African-American literature in the Jim Crow Era. In her chapter, Laura F. Edwards looks deeply into local and appellate court decisions in South Carolina to demonstrate how ‘local level patriarchy’ functioned and how notions of womanhood were constructed (vol. 2, p. 148).

Although slave women's experiences in bondage are the focus of most of the collection, several chapters examine women's quests for freedom or the nature of women's freedom in slaveholding and formerly slaveholding societies. Benard Moitt explores how slave women in the Caribbean manipulated French laws meant to oppress them to gain the right to redeem themselves. His examples demonstrate the ingenuity and opportunism of slave women, as well as the degree to which they desired freedom, even if it came at a price. Laurence Brown and Tara Inniss examine a disturbing spike in child mortality in 1841, linking it to former masters’ attempts to use freed women's need for shelter and subsistence to force them to perform fieldwork. Myriam Cottias studies how marriage became a central aspect of citizenship after emancipation in the French Antilles, which meant that unmarried free women became social deviants in the eyes of the state. Each of these essays provides interesting points of comparison with Richard B. Allen's chapter in volume one. Allen examines the ability of free women of colour in Mauritius between 1767 and 1830 to work within a racist and patriarchal system to improve the conditions of their lives. Gender did not present, he argues, ‘a barrier to free colored socioeconomic advancement’ (vol. 1, p. 374).

While the volumes are valuable additions to the scholarship on slavery and slave systems, they are not without their problems. Most glaring, with only one case study focused south of the equator, volume two displays the same North Atlantic bias that has long plagued African diaspora historiography. Further, volume two has an Anglo bias with five chapters centred in English colonies, two in French colonies, and only one in a Portuguese colony. No chapter focuses on a Spanish or Dutch slaveholding society in the Americas.

Also, only one chapter in the entire collection delves deeply into one of the principal topics presently occupying the attention of scholars of the African diaspora in the Atlantic. Historians have expended considerable energy debating whether Africans ‘recreated’ Old World cultures in New World contexts or ‘created’ new syncretic or creolized cultures after being torn from their homelands. Although some of the contributors to Women and slavery explore the gendered identities that women slaves forged (or were given), most fail to ask from where these identities sprang. Most, too, fail to examine the interplay of gendered identities with other – particularly ethnic and national – identities. Did gendered identities trump ethnic and national ones? Did African slave women draw on their pasts to express alternatives to Enlightenment ideas about women and women's roles? Have debates about the importance of ethnicity and nation centred on men? In an exciting chapter that pushes African diaspora historiography in a new direction, Mariza de Carvalho Soares engages these questions by using church records from eighteenth-century Brazil to study how one African woman articulated ethnic, national, and gendered identities in a struggle over a Catholic brotherhood's assets. For Soares, African women in Brazil could use ‘a sort of ethnicity that emerges from a strong representation of the African past’ to fight against attempts to marginalize them with ‘notions of competitive gender, and its exclusionary consequences for women’ (vol. 2, p. 94).

Despite the collection's few problems, Women and slavery makes a significant contribution to our understanding of slavery in global context. The contributors succeed in their aim of not simply adding women to a previously known history. As Robertson and Robinson do in their historiographical essay, they ‘remodel slavery’, showing the centrality of women to slave systems around the world.