This is the second of two volumes on child slaves, the first of which, Children in Slavery through the Ages, focused on comparative examples of the trade in children and on children as slaves in various places from North America to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The larger focus of this second volume is on the transformations in how children have experienced slavery since the period of abolition, roughly from the middle of the eighteenth century until the First World War, with a second, shorter, section on child slaves in the period since then. As with the earlier volume and two companion volumes on women and slavery by the same editors, this volume grew out of conferences organized by Gywn Campbell that were subject to a model of intellectual interaction that required papers to be distributed in advance and, rather than authors presenting their individual papers, specific discussants were asked to write commentaries on the theme of the conference, in this case children and slavery.

The chapters in the first section of this volume focus on Africa or the African diaspora in the Americas, while the second section on the twentieth century includes discussion of slavery in other contexts as well. Thus Benjamin Lawrance discusses the children of the Amistad; Cecily Jones examines youthful resistance in the plantations societies of the British Caribbean; Sue Taylor reports on the strategies of slave families in Caracas to protect their children in the century after 1750; while Nara Milanich describes the exploitation of children in nineteenth-century Latin America through what she calls ‘tutelary servitude’, which did not only include children of African descent. In the chapters on Africa, Campbell studies children and bondage in imperial Madagascar; Martin Klein provides an overview of children and slavery in the western Sudan; Bernard Moitt considers the guardianship (tutelle) of children in post-emancipation Senegal; Trevor Getz reports on how unfree children were treated by British magistrates in the early Gold Coast colony; and finally, William G. Clarence-Smith examines the practices of Christian missionaries in redeeming children from slavery in central Africa from 1878 to 1914.

In the essays on the modern period, Jonathan Blagbrough focuses on the problems of analysing the domestic labor of children in contemporary times; Philip Whalen and Malika Id' Salah study girls as domestic slaves in contemporary France; Zosa de Sas Kropiwnicki analyzes young prostitutes in Cape Town; Sarah Maguire looks at slavery and child soldiers, primarily in Sri Lanka; and Mike Dottridge provides an overview of contemporary child slavery. The book is well indexed but, unfortunately, does not have a bibliography. The book would have benefitted from more illustrations and maps; with the exception of one illustration in Lawrance's chapter, all the illustrations and the one map are in a single chapter. The short introduction to the book would have been more useful if the results of the first volume had been summarized and there were some analysis of the relationships, contrasts, and comparisons among the various contributions to the two volumes. Despite these qualifications, the editors are to be commended for assembling these papers. The subject of children and slavery has only recently become a special focus of scholars, although earlier work on slave families, slavery, and kinship have considered infancy, childhood, and growing up under slavery in other contexts. The focus on children as such is, therefore, a significant breakthrough in understanding slavery as a system in different institutionalized contexts.