The ending of slavery has hardly been a neglected topic in the last fifty years. Hundreds of books and articles have explored the emancipation of several million enslaved persons during the course of the long nineteenth century. Any scholar or student interested in the history of the Americas, Africa, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, or of the various European empires cannot have failed to grasp the momentous importance of the ending of slavery and the impact it had in each of the societies to experience it. Scully and Paton's edited collection does several things never attempted before. Most impressive is its geographic scope: in one volume there are essays on French and British colonial possessions in Africa; on Spanish, French, and British Caribbean islands; on Brazil and on the United States. Students are able to compare the emancipation experiences of freedpeople throughout the Atlantic littoral fairly readily, and the omissions (nothing on Surinam/Guyana or on the U.S. east coast, for instance) can be fairly easily rectified by consulting the very helpful bibliographic essay at the end of the volume.

The main reason that the editors elected to put together this particular collection, however, is the focus on gender. The editors and the authors interpret “gender” in a variety of ways: some focus on the different experiences of black men and women as they made the transition from slavery to freedom; others explore the role that black and white women took in driving the emancipation movement forward. The use of gender as an analytical tool in emancipation studies is not new. Leslie A. Schwalm (A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997]) and Marli F. Weiner (Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–80 [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998]) wrote on precisely this theme nearly a decade ago. However the essays collected here extend the coverage considerably and permit us to see how far the field has developed. While most of the essays are of high quality, invariably there is some unevenness in approach. A few essays, such as Peabody's on the French Caribbean and Newton's on Barbados, take a fairly broad chronological approach allowing the reader to clearly observe the changes that occurred over several decades. Others, such as Zeuske's on Cuba and Scully's on Cape Colony, take a much more detailed approach, often focusing in on one or two specific individual cases. The latter type of essays rely much more on gender theory for their argument and less on empirical evidence, something that I personally always find slightly problematic. Undoubtedly these essays are cleverly written, but I prefer a sounder base on which to construct an argument than theory.

I do not intend to list the arguments of each individual essay, but there are clearly some common themes that tie the essays together in important ways. There is a broad agreement that men were “better” at emancipation than women, in that they secured a variety of rights and statuses for themselves that were not available to women. Where freedpeople were enfranchised, only men were permitted to vote; men were accorded responsibility for providing food for their families, and the status of “breadwinner”; some freedmen had played a military role in the overthrow of colonial rule which gave them a special “veteran” status; men were also often acknowledged as the “masters” of their own households, a mastery they now shared with their white former masters. In many senses this gendered difference should not come as a surprise. Slavery as a system had an emasculatory effect on slave men, denying them the rights as fathers and husbands that were normal for white men of all social classes, and therefore it is logical that one of the outcomes of emancipation should have been a restoration of the gender “norms” of the nineteenth century. What is interesting is that the elevation of freedmen to the status of father and husband was often deliberately promoted by former slave masters and mistresses as the best way to guarantee the safety and stability of society.

The experiences of freedwomen were far more varied. In some instances traditional maternity rights were swept away, and female autonomy was increasingly subsumed under the elevated status of freedmen. The tensions that had long existed between the working and reproductive role of black women were not swept away by emancipation, just reconfigured. Many freedwomen spent increasing amounts of time on the provision grounds growing the crops and tending the livestock that would feed their family and provide goods for trade, and women continued to monopolize the market-trading popular in former slave societies.

This work can readily be recommended to those interested in the transition from slavery to freedom in a wide variety of Atlantic World societies. As an exploration of how freedpeople themselves negotiated the transition under a variety of competing influences this volume makes a significant contribution to the literature.