Several years have passed since the initial 2009 publication of Benedetta Rossi's edited volume Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories. Although it is entitled Reconfiguring Slavery, Rossi's emphasis is on trajectories: not only where the enslavement has been practiced in West Africa, but how those practices have moved, changed, and ceased. These are questions that of necessity focus on emancipation. In 2001, Henry Louis Gates wondered about ‘the apparent willingness of so many African societies’ to participate ‘in bartering what, to us here appear to be their brothers and sisters, for a mess of pottage’.Footnote ¹ This interpretative model — the ‘black betrayal’ paradigm, as Bayo Holsey describes it — has served as an important role in ‘reduc[ing] Africans to slave raiders’ and forged ‘the very origins of the European notion of a corporate African identity’.Footnote ² Scholars such as Suzannie Miers, Igor Kopytoff, Ugo Nwokeji, Akosua Perbi, Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall, and Walter Hawthorne have complicated and particularized how scholars imagine the ethnic, social, cultural, and economic identities and statuses of enslaved Africans.Footnote ³ Rossi's edited volume engages this project of particularization, especially as it relates to emancipations of enslaved peoples throughout West Africa.

Now available in its second, paperback edition, Rossi's volume promises — as it did in its first printing — to imagine slavery and emancipation ‘not as a unified reality, but as a fragmented phenomenon that requires qualification’ (xiii). Each context of abolition generates qualifying questions, such as: Emancipated from what? Liberty to be where? And bondage from whom? As Martin Klein concludes in his contribution: ‘[I]f the term slavery has any precise meaning, it no longer exists for most of West Africa’ (39–40). Might the same be said for its abolition?

When first released, Rossi's volume found itself riding a tide of interest in abolition studies. Seymour Drescher's tome, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, also published in 2009, offered up a global history of abolitions from the early modern period through the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴ While Drescher places less emphasis on the local, his volume highlights the important argument that slave systems are resilient, resistant to change, and their dismantlement requires concerted, persistent action. For all the strength of Drescher's work, Rossi's volume cuts against the vast reaches of that metanarrative to find complexities in its cracks and crevices. Indeed, this volume is founded on the premise that the simple term slavery has ‘lost interpretative value’ (5).

Just as African ‘slaveries’ have never functioned as a single-dimensional analytical category, neither has ‘emancipation’, ‘liberty’, or ‘bondage’. The volume's treatment of slave emancipation also illuminates increased scholarly attention to the challenges to slave freedoms throughout West Africa. As chapters by Alice Bellagamba and Jean Schmitz discuss, the lines between slavery and emancipation blur in Senegambia. Bellagamba points to situational factors, such as proximity between masters and enslaved people, and a general lack of resources, which means that the burden typically falls upon the formerly enslaved to renegotiate their relationship with their former masters. In some settlements in the twentieth century, the descendants of some enslaved people opted to ally with the descendants of the former master, leading to a relationship ‘better conceived as a form of family heritage to whose continuity both sides commit’ (64). Jean Schmitz analyzes slave emancipation in the Senegal River valley, revealing a host of emancipations generated variously by Islamic land dispersal and clientage, Islamic conversion, and French assimilationist policies. Those processes highlight exactly how much the term ‘emancipation’ elides the complexities of contexts where a number of cultural and social systems intersect (85–106).

In her chapter, Christine Hardung highlights how GannunKeebe (Fulfulde: former slaves and slave descendants) have utilized ancestral knowledge in order to maintain peaceful relationships with former Beninese masters, an argument that engages with Holsey's work on slavery and memory-making in twentieth-century Ghana. Eric Hahonou argues that in Niger and Benin, while former slaves have come to dominate political office, they have also perpetuated old patron-client relationships that once defined slave society. Klein's chapter argues that slave descendants in the Sahara and the Sudan, while legally free, have chosen to continue working within the social structures of slave-master relationships. Similarly, Olivier Leservoisier maintains that while slavery was legally abolished in Mauritania in 1981, ex-slaves ‘reproduce the hierarchical foundations of society as a precondition for their own social mobility’ (141).

The field has experienced several exciting developments since the publication of Rossi's first edition. The ongoing digital history efforts of Henry Lovejoy et al.'s Liberated Africans Project has provided access to tens of thousands of emancipation records in Sierra Leone, Brazil, and Cuba.Footnote ⁵ Since the publication of this volume, various other studies, such as those by Alessandra Brivio on the nineteenth-century emancipation of enslaved women in the Gold Coast, Christine Whyte on abolition movements in early twentieth-century Abyssinia and Sierra Leone, and Ann McDougall on slave labor in Saharan salt mines have illuminated the varieties of emancipations in the African continent.Footnote ⁶

Rossi's volume offers readers a probing look at the uneven contours of the terrae of slave scholarship; indeed, one of the contributions of this volume is to demonstrate exactly how uneven are the contours of studies of enslavement and emancipation. This book accentuates, emphasizes, and casts in sharp focus the necessity of incorporating local, regional, and transoceanic dynamics in our study of slavery and emancipation. Rossi's volume has made — and will continue to make — an important and useful contribution to scholarship on African slaveries.