Before reviewing the contents of this reference work on abolition and emancipation it is worth outlining its basic composition. The first two volumes contain 468 short articles written by 112 different scholars, at least some of whom were PhD students at the time that they submitted their contributions. All articles finish with one or more cross-references to other topics and suggestions for further reading. The third volume is a collection of primary source documents, divided into seven categories, each headed by a brief introduction. Volume 1 begins with an alphabetical list of the encyclopaedia's contents, followed by a topic finder and a 26-page introduction by the editor. Volumes 2 and 3 have their own lists of contents, plus the general topic finder. The topic finder points the reader to, among other things, a host of abolitionists of various nationalities, including a group of feminist activists. All volumes share the same 65-page index at the end, but volume 3 has an additional chronology, running from the 1510s to 1888 (from the first African slave imports into the Spanish Caribbean to the abolition of slavery in Brazil), and an extensive bibliography.

The introduction by Junius Rodriguez is a narrative of the rise of the abolitionist movement in Europe and North America, concentrating first on its intellectual and social roots, and next on political developments in the United States from 1808 – when the Atlantic slave trade was banned by Britain and the USA – to emancipation during the American Civil War. Regrettably, Rodriguez hardly takes notice of some vital discussions in the recent historiography on abolitionism. For instance, what explains the extraordinary success of the anti-slavery campaign in Britain? How did British abolitionists, against the arguments of their pro-slavery opponents, manage to convince Parliament and the public of not only the moral but also the economic superiority of free labour? Why did strong anti-slavery movements fail to develop elsewhere in Europe, or in the settler societies of the Americas? Questions such as these are also not answered in the entries on, for example, the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, abolition in the British and French West Indies, or prominent anti-slavery advocates, such as Wilberforce and Buxton. Remarkably, there is no separate entry for the Anti-Slavery Society, which few would doubt was an important body in the history of abolition. Most of the entries are nonetheless informative in their own way, and the market for an encyclopaedia of course demands that they be kept fairly descriptive and factual. But the editor could have used the introduction for a more profound engagement with current trends in the historiography.

It is furthermore unfortunate that neither the introduction nor any of the articles provide information about the impact of the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery itself on different New World economies. In the British West Indies, these events were accompanied by economic decline on the one hand, and the expansion of slave-based sugar production in Brazil and Cuba on the other, as well as by the migration of former slaves and their descendants to Cuba and Central America, and the importation of indentured labour from Asia. These developments were part of the process of emancipation, and should therefore have been included in this encyclopaedia.

Geographically, the encyclopaedia is strongly focused on the United Kingdom and North America. On the one hand this is understandable, as the abolitionist movement originated in these two regions. On the other hand, it reflects an existing bias towards the Anglophone world in the scholarship on slavery and abolition in the Atlantic basin. Needless to say, the abolition of slavery was also a landmark in the history of many Latin American countries. But except for Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and New Granada (Colombia), these countries are not represented with a single entry.

As indicated by a map reproduced in all three volumes, Brazil was by far the largest import region in the transatlantic slave trade, and the country is reasonably well represented here. Thus, besides general entries on abolition and emancipation in Brazil, we find articles on several abolitionists (although a key figure, the politician Rui Barbosa, is missing); the seventeenth-century maroon society of Palmares; the 1835 Muslim rebellion in Bahia; the Queiros Law of 1850, which put an end to slave imports into Brazil; and the reproduction, in volume 3, of a number of original documents. However, the single largest exporter of African slaves, Angola, is practically absent, despite its well-documented history of abolition and emancipation laws. In volume 3, there is reproduced a law of 1856, by which Portugal abolished slavery in the Zaire and Cabinda regions, which happened to be outside Portuguese control at the time. For the abolition of the slave trade by Portugal in 1836, which accidentally put a dent in Angola's foreign trade, or the abolition of slavery in 1875, interested readers will have to consult alternative sources.

Africa, which became a focal point for abolitionists after slavery was eradicated in the West Indies, generally receives only scant attention. The continent is mainly represented here by Sierra Leone and Liberia, which Britain and the United States respectively attempted to colonize with freed black slaves. Otherwise, one article on abolition in West Africa provides some information on colonial policies towards African slavery, but it suffers from an overly generalist approach. The variety of historical forms of slavery, and the ways in which the West, missionaries included, tried to intervene in African societies, warrant more than a single entry.

In short, the encyclopaedia is strong on Europe and North America, has a fair number of entries on Brazil, but neglects a fourth continent bordering the Atlantic – Africa. Omissions of relevant topics as indicated in this review, in addition to some seemingly odd inclusions (such as items on emancipation in Russia and the Ottoman Empire), suggest that the selection of topics has at times been arbitrary, or perhaps too dependent on what contributors were able to offer. It should also come as no surprise that, with input from more than one hundred authors and only one editor, the quality of the writing is not of the same standard throughout. But that should not distract us from the fact that Rodriguez, after editing similar collections on world slavery, slave resistance, and slavery in the United States, has assembled a mass of useful information on a series of crucial events in modern human history.