As long ago as the 1980s, the historian Peter Parish advocated that those researching US slavery spend more time probing the “edges” or margins of the regime in order to shed greater light on the centre. Some thirty years later, M. Scott Heerman's exciting and impressive book takes Parish's suggestions a step further. For Heerman, American slavery did not consist of a “centre” and “edges” but instead took a multiplicity of forms across time and space. This highly nuanced appraisal focusses on Illinois and the book's considerable chronology runs from early settlement in the 1730s through to the era of emancipation. The breadth of chronology is matched by Heerman's wide thematic base. In his consideration of Jesuit, Native American, and African enslavement, and by exploring forms of involuntary servitude such as contract servitude and black kidnapping, Heerman does vitally important work in complicating our overall understanding of slavery on the North American continent.

Heerman writes in extremely eloquent prose, sometimes quite provocatively. He presents a gripping narrative of how the “alchemy” of slavery changed over time. Slavery was created, combined and transformed in a variety of ways in Illinois, and this important work serves to complicate further many of the binary assumptions about the regime, be these related to change over time, conceptualizations about “black slaves and free whites,” or the delineation between bondage and freedom. For Heerman, slavery should be considered an adaptable set of varying forms, or, to use his wonderful language, “a kaleidoscope of different coercive practices” (8). Importantly, though, he challenges the plural notion of “slaveries,” because Illinois enslavers forged one single localized system of slaveholding, which then affected the ways in which enslaved people and others fought for their liberty. Utilizing a range of primary evidence, including diplomatic correspondence from French and British colonial archives and local legal records from the United States (especially county courthouses), Heerman also makes extensive use of newspapers and political debates. While he acknowledges that his source base often fails to include the perspectives of enslaved people, it is nonetheless clear that Heerman has worked hard to engage with their struggles for autonomy and liberty.

The first chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “French negroes” – a diverse group of indigenous and African slaves within the Illinois country of the French Empire, and the second tracks the development of slavery once the area came under the control of the British rather than the French. In sparkling prose, Heerman conveys how, while imperial officials “dithered” in London, a local legal culture filled this vacuum (54). Both the French and British failed in their attempts to create a colonial plantation economy in the Illinois country, and thereafter the US government then attempted to do the same. In this third chapter, Heerman is at his most provocative and contentious in claiming that the US government constituted the third “distant imperial power” to claim the Illinois country (61). Essentially, Heerman argues that an evolving legal culture, especially in relation to slave codes, was local rather than federal. Federal control remained weak, as it had been under the British and French. This local legal culture meant the government failed to directly enforce the 1787 ban on slavery, though it also denied requests to legalize slavery in Illinois. Stressing continuities in the Illinois country, Heerman argues the assertion of US power in the region was simply another chapter in the history of empires and slavery rather than a new era itself.

The fourth chapter onwards, in part due to the better availability of source materials, focusses more on the perspectives of those enslaved as Illinois moved into statehood in 1818. “French negroes” could be held in slavery due to grandfather clauses, while others were bound by long indentured-servitude contracts, or baptized by Catholic priests into slavery within local churches, while others still hired out their own labor. So slavery had no single, fixed form, but reinvented itself over time, and economic changes also brought about new roles for enslaved people, including working in salt mines, growing crops, performing domestic labor, and working as artisans and in shipping industries.

Yet African Americans challenged these contracts, and brought various legal suits against their masters, in what Heerman aptly describes as a “jerry-rigged” system of slavery and servitude in Illinois (103). Their various paths to freedom are developed in chapter 5. As the numbers of enslaved “French negroes” declined, the number of free people of color in the state grew due to domestic migration. Residents of free black towns, along with the enslaved, directly challenged slavery in the state, and Heerman's detailed evidence of legal cases conveys how emancipation was indeed a process that took time to achieve because freedom had to be proved. Women outnumbered men among those who sued for their liberty, in part because of their desire to free their children.

The final chapter tracks the development of the anti-slavery politics created by black communities from the 1830s onwards. Despite a growing problem of black kidnapping, abolitionism grew in Illinois as black and white activists joined forces and the Jarrot decision of 1845 finally made the state free soil. Heerman here covers more familiar and less innovative ground in his discussion of the creation of the Republican Party and the Lincoln–Douglas debates of the 1850s. He concludes with the state's ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and repeal of the black codes which occurred in the same session.

Overall, this book sheds important new light on relatively neglected aspects of American slavery. The clever and provocative prose challenges many assumptions about the regime and provides a wider lens from which historians can make points of comparison and contrast, and it deserves a wide readership.