This volume results from a multiple-session workshop at the 2010 meeting of the American Historical Association, on the topic of ‘Slaving Paths: Rebuilding and Rethinking the Atlantic Worlds’. As editor Ana Lucia Araujo's introduction stresses, the dozen contributions focus on ‘the lived experiences of the Africans and their descendants' (p. 6), not on the economic enterprise of the Atlantic slave trade, in order to emphasise the extent to which the processes involved in the transit of people, commodities and ideas, rather than being coterminous with the slave trade, ‘are still today the objects of continuous transformation and reinvention’ (p. 7).

Following Araujo's concise and useful introduction, the volume consists of four sections, each including three essays. The first, ‘Moving Paths’, centres on concepts of mobility and networks as essential contributors to both individual and corporate ideas of race and identity, and begins with Jennifer L. Anderson's study of the role played by New England merchants in the Caribbean, and in particular the ways in which the traders and mariners of a region little associated with slaveholding ‘reshaped people's lives as they redistributed labor through their carrying trade’ (p. 22). In Craig T. Marin's essay on maritime slaves and resistance in Charleston, he builds upon the seminal works of, among others, Marcus Rediker and Jeffrey Bolster in order to show the extent to which maritime labour was highly racially and ethnically diverse, often involved intra-racial cooperation, and offered comparative freedom of movement even to the enslaved men on ship. Jeffrey A. Fortin tracks the forced relocation of the Maroon community of Trelawney Town, Jamaica, to the inhospitable climate of Nova Scotia; this was an act which a British observer stated was ‘little short of National Murder’ (p. 71), and which, Fortin asserts, ‘illustrates the tenuous nature of freedom in the Atlantic world,’ as the Maroons, though not slaves, were nonetheless subjected in Canada to a situation far closer to bondage than to liberty.

The volume's second section, ‘Paths to Freedom’, analyses the ways in which the transition from slavery to emancipation played out across the hemisphere, in the United States, the French Caribbean and Brazil. Céline Flory's essay discusses the experiences of ‘new Africans', or indentured workers, in Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana in the second half of the nineteenth century, and she finds that, although on the surface these men and women soon adapted to the new realities of life and work in the French colonies, their race limited them to the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. This situation encourages Flory to ‘question the legacy of slavery … and to highlight the configuration of new forms of servitude’ (p. 123) across the Atlantic world. In ‘The Ship of Slavery’, Sharla M. Fett studies the activities of the African American abolitionists of 1850s Manhattan, especially ex-slave James Pennington, in conjunction with interracial radical groups' attempts to stamp out the illegal transatlantic slave trade; she concludes that ‘the contested destinies of Africans rescued from illegal slavers became interwoven with the liberty of New York's free black communities' (p. 132) on the eve of the Civil War. Looking southwards, Peter M. Beattie interrogates the connections between abolitionism and opposition to capital punishment in late nineteenth-century Brazil, which was one of the first countries to outlaw the death penalty but the last in the hemisphere to end slavery.

The third section, ‘Paths of Identities’, studies three former slaving ports in the South Atlantic in relation to the Afro-creole identities that emerged there both before and after the slave trade ended. Lisa Earl Temple's study of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, looks at a particular temple of candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion, to emphasise the ongoing connections between Africa and Brazil in the eras of both slavery and emancipation. Similar ground is trod in Mariana P. Candido's study of commercial links between Bahia and the west central African port of Benguela in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Wendy Wilson-Fall discovers a fascinating subculture of sharp female slave traders in eighteenth-century Senegal and Madasgascar.

The final section, ‘Paths of Representation’, is devoted to the ways in which images of enslaved men and women have allowed the retention and reinterpretation of memories of slavery throughout the Atlantic world. Peter H. Wood discovers a hidden history of slavery in Winslow Homer's iconic 1899 painting The Gulf Stream, while Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie's contribution contrasts the ubiquitous abolitionist image of a kneeling slave with bound wrists, looking imploringly heavenwards, with post-emancipation depictions of ‘an alternative dialectic of slaves supplicant and slaves triumphant’ (p. 328, emphasis in original). Finally, Awam Amkpa and Gunja SenGupta focus on several filmic depictions of the black Atlantic in light of the way they respond to issues of race, identity and particularly concepts of home.

Although the scholarly quality of the dozen essays included here is uniformly high, Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade, like so many edited volumes produced from conference proceedings, is likely to appeal in its entirety to a fairly limited audience, as it is difficult to imagine that many readers, or their students, will be equally interested in, for example, Brazilian candomblé practitioners, the art of Winslow Homer and the fate of the Jamaican Maroons. Nonetheless, the quality and variety of the contributions make this book a desirable purchase for research libraries, and scholars of the history and culture of slavery and the black Atlantic are well advised to direct their attention to the essays which best match their interests and to consult the extensive and up-to-date bibliography of primary and secondary sources with which Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade closes. Araujo and her contributors deserve praise for putting together this exciting collection, as does Cambria Press for producing it as an attractively designed and well-laid-out volume.