The 2007 commemorations marking the bicentennial of Britain's abolition of the slave trade reinvigorated discussion about the profits from slavery funneling back to the metropole. Likewise, they reaffirmed Britain's significant role in the trade of human cargo. Scholars have long understood England, Scotland, and Ireland's involvement in this story, but as with many topics in British history, Wales has been essentially left out. Chris Evans's Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660–1850 places England's first colony within that sphere of activity to show Welsh participation in New World enslavement and the importance of slave-based assets in fueling industrialization west of Offa's Dyke.

Evans divides his account into eight sections, each taking one of three general directions: connecting Wales's economy to New World slavery, uncovering Welsh individuals tied to Atlantic enslavement, and discussing the Welsh dimension—if and when it existed—of major events in the history of the British slave trade. The first of those themes, sandwiched in the middle of the book, is a penetrating examination of Welsh industrialization in the slave age. Copper smelting boomed in Wales at the beginning of the eighteenth century, growing up alongside the slaving activities of Bristol, its neighbor on the Severn. Slavers often traded copper bars directly for Africans. As Evans points out, the metal took on even deeper connections to slavery, protecting the hulls of slaving ships, and holding the boiling contents of raw sugar during its refinement. Bristol's ships also transported “Welsh plain” woolens for slave trading in an African market often reluctant to accept British goods, as well as for clothing enslaved laborers throughout the Atlantic. Before U.S. textile production exploded in the nineteenth century, this was a vital commodity in the Welsh economy. Indeed, Evans skillfully shows the enormous profits made in Wales from connections to slavery. Anthony Bacon, for instance, accrued a fortune in the tobacco business before returning to Wales to start yet more lucrative projects: coal mining, metal casting, and coke smelting. Here, Evans provides an intriguing analysis of how domestic products typically associated with the nation's current identity—particularly coal and slate—often developed with funding from Atlantic slavery. Moreover, as Evans reveals in his final section, 1834 did not cut financial ties between Wales and enslavement. Even after full emancipation, La Consolidada, a London company financed by Welsh investment, excavated the El Cobre mines in Cuba using enslaved workers. British antislavery activists reacted harshly to La Consolidada, pushing through the 1843 Act for the more effectual Suppression of the Slave Trade, which Evans believes “must rank as the foremost ‘Welsh’ contribution to global abolition” (129).

The other principal themes in Evans's work bookend his account of industrialization but prove less successful at promoting Wales in the story of New World slavery. The book's opening two sections interweave a broad account of Atlantic colonization and African slavery, homing in on two Welshmen's activities in particular: famed privateer-turned-governor Henry Morgan, and captain of the slave ship Hannibal, Thomas Phillips. Both of these stories are familiar to scholars of Atlantic slavery, and Evans's retelling strays little from traditional narratives. Surprisingly, Evans also neglects to indicate the importance of a Welsh focus in these accounts. Sections 6 and 7, which survey abolitionism, suffer from similar constraints in approach. Abolition had advocates in Wales, but Evans finds the movement to be lackluster there, save for Swansea. He rightfully points to the trial of Trinidad's erstwhile Governor Thomas Picton, who tortured a mixed-race woman in the colonies, as a turning point in British abolitionism. However, the fact that Picton grew up in Wales seems to have had little influence on the scope of that affair. Even Evans admits that his subjects “were Welsh, but their Welshness had no special bearing on their slaving activities” (29). With that concession in mind, his call for a reoriented perspective toward Wales in these stories is puzzling. Without any contextualization of Welshness and the Welsh polity, Evans's perspective appears, instead, restricted to a seemingly arbitrary geographic boundary. Considering that Scottish and Irish migrants involved themselves in slavery as a method of advancement from marginalized imperial positions, it would have benefited the text to reflect on how a colonized people, joined to England before the large-scale rise of African slavery, used the institution for their own improvement. Moreover, Evans could have made better use of the Slebech papers on the Welsh-Jamaican Phillips family, and he omits entirely the case of Nathaniel Wells, the mixed-race St. Kittitian born to an enslaved woman, who inherited his father's estate in 1794 and settled as a landed elite in Monmouthshire.

As a whole, Evans's three thematic points provide conclusive evidence that Wales, and its inhabitants, engaged substantively in Atlantic slavery. His treatment of New World enslavement is at times oversimplified—especially in his discussions of Virginia's early slave statuses and the relationship between religion and abolition—but he covers an expansive chronological range accurately. He should also be commended for using a transimperial approach toward his subject, rather than sequestering Wales solely within the British slave system. Slave Wales makes a needed contribution to Welsh history while reminding its readers of the benefit in connecting individual localities to global phenomena. Indeed, if there are scholars still unconvinced that colonial practices, particularly slavery, did not significantly affect the metropole, Evans's work on Welsh industrialization should persuade them of the deep reach of such institutions to even the smallest corners of the British Isles.