Over time, slave-owners across the Atlantic world received financial compensation for black emancipation. In contrast, following the end of slavery, formerly enslaved people themselves became increasingly burdened with new debts and obligations to work in a world defined by the continuing ramifications of racial slavery. Ana Lucia Araujo provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the struggles of formerly enslaved people and their descendants to redress the history of slavery and its legacy, focusing particularly upon struggles for financial and material reparations. The book builds upon Araujo's previous work on the history and memory of Atlantic slavery including Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth Century Artist in the Tropics and African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World. Drawing on sources in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English, Araujo presents an account of black reparations struggles in Atlantic perspective, offering a transnational and comparative account of what has otherwise been too often told in isolation.

The book begins with an overview of slavery and the slave trade, bringing together north and south Atlantic histories. The overview extends from the fifteenth-century origins of Atlantic world slavery through the gradual end of slavery over the nineteenth century. This first chapter demonstrates the vast extent and historical persistence of racial slavery. The overview provides necessary context for understanding a central argument of Araujo's book: post-slavery reparations struggles emerged in relation to the particularities of the historical “slave systems” in the countries from which these struggles emerged (4).

Araujo demonstrates how demands for reparations began with formerly enslaved people and were sustained and renewed throughout history by the political and social organizing of their descendants. As she traces, such demands did not begin in the twentieth century. Instead, the earliest known successful instance of financial reparations was in the late eighteenth century in the state of Massachusetts, in the form of payment to Belinda Sutton, who received an annual pension (50). Despite frequent demands for reparations in some form, success was rare. From the eighteenth century through the gradual decline of slavery in the Americas during the nineteenth century, formerly enslaved individuals made demands for financial reparations. However, sustained demands for reparations emerged following the abolition of slavery in the Americas.

The book further allows readers to better understand post-slavery reparations struggles as occurring across former slaveholding societies. It reveals how throughout the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century demands for reparations were extensive but unsuccessful. This insight reveals ways that well-documented studies of reparations struggles such as that of Callie House's National Ex-Slave Mutual, Relief, Benevolent, and Aid Society are comparatively related to Garveyite reparations movements, Cuba's Agrarian Reform Law, and organizations such as the Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves.

Although the period between World War I and World War II was characterized by decreased reparations activity, subsequent reparations activism emerged with new urgency, particularly toward the end of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, demands for reparations continued with renewed force as activism acquired an increasingly transnational character. These transnationally coordinated demands have continued into this decade. In 2013, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) addressed a ten-point plan for reparations to European governments including the United Kingdom, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal (175-76).

This book offers a necessary history, not just for the present, but also for future reparations struggles. Even though it notes the significance of slavery and the slave trade within the development of capitalism (42), the book might also have provided further insight into the extent to which different reparations movements conceived of and challenged capitalism as racially structured through a focus on financial and material demands. The book is absolutely indispensable and makes an important contribution to what Araujo concludes is an “unfinished struggle” (179-84).