This excellent volume is innovative in many ways. First, it brings the history of slavery in the Southwest to a new audience other than historians of a single locality, by placing it in its national context. Second, it corrects the neglect of peonage and the captivity of Natives and New Mexicans and situates that history alongside broader mid-nineteenth-century discussions over race and labour. Finally, it shows the complex ways in which New Mexico's elites, members of the military, and bonded labourers negotiated the changing cultural and legal responses to forced labour to advance their own causes.

Kiser traces the long history of forced labour in New Mexico, showing how, in the Spanish colonial period, despite Indian slavery being outlawed by the Spanish monarchy, slave raiding took place on a large scale. Indian women and children were especially prized and were assimilated by force into the Euro-American community, given new names and baptised. Slaves were traded at large annual fairs, where sexually available women were advertised using the term ‘likely’, just as female African American chattel slaves were (60). Owning Indian slaves for the New Mexican elite was a visible symbol of status and wealth. Natives were involved in slave raiding, attacking other tribes and raiding Euro-American communities. Simultaneously, debt peonage emerged, operating at the boundary of slavery and wage labour (11). Many peons were descendants of Indian slaves, kept in their place by systems of credit, ensuring that they could not extricate themselves from indebtedness.

Kiser acknowledges that James Brooks opened up the field with his 2001 book Captives and Cousins, examining slavery and race in a New Mexican context (17), but Kiser sees this as a national story. He shows that, after the Mexican War, the debates taking place in Washington over the environmental suitability of the region for chattel slavery had little impact on the coerced labourers on the ground (26). However, certain commentators, such as the New-York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, acknowledged the irony of these debates overlooking the existence of New Mexican slavery in a different form. Abolitionists took little interest in peonage and Indian captivity, leaving themselves open to a charge of hypocrisy from pro-slavery advocates like John C. Calhoun.

Kiser's book is also especially interesting in the way that it reveals the interests of the political and military elite of the region in slave-trading and -owning, at the very time that they were using the issue to manoeuvre statehood for New Mexico. The military were at the forefront of slave-ownership in the region, as the War Department offered soldiers an income to maintain a ‘servant’. The few African Americans enslaved in the region before the Civil War were owned by members of the military, but military efforts also generated a number of Indian captives, such as Kit Carson's expeditions in 1863 where Ute auxiliaries fought against the Navajo and were awarded prisoners whom they then sold (85).

One omission from the book is enslaved voices because of the paucity of resources. We have no slave narratives from either the Indian captive or the Hispanic peon. Their experiences are mediated through the voices of travellers and observers, or in court documents. Pro- and anti-slavery campaigners used stories of peons for their own rhetorical ends. For example, John C. Calhoun said that Mexican peonage was worse than chattel slavery (97). Anti-slavery campaigners trying to keep the territory “free” held racist views and saw African Americans as a nuisance and hoped to keep them out of New Mexico. However, some New Mexican officials defended the silenced peons. In an example of anti-slavery judicial activism, Kirby Benedict, chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, often ruled in favour of Indians and Hispanics in peonage cases that came before him.

During the Civil War, many peons freed themselves by becoming Union volunteers, but as elsewhere in the Union-occupied South, the Emancipation Proclamation had little effect on those retained in servitude. New Mexico was again denied statehood because of its labour system, with this fault often discussed in highly racialized terms. Although 171 New Mexicans were tried for peonage after the federal 1867 Peon Law was passed, it was very difficult to get a conviction from jurors who sympathized with the owner (167).

Overall, this is an excellent book which contributes a great deal to the study of different forms of slavery in the United States. By placing New Mexico's history of peonage and captivity in a national context, it enlightens historians as to the subtleties in attitudes in this period towards race and bonded labour.