Slavery was a global business. This is the message at the heart of Slavery hinterland, a collection of essays that admirably extends the study of Europe's relationship to slavery beyond the traditional focus on Britain, France and the Iberian Peninsula. In practice the ‘continental Europe’ of the subtitle refers mostly to the German-speaking regions (including Switzerland) of Central Europe over three centuries, an area which, as several authors remind the reader, has rarely been considered as part of the transatlantic slave system. In attempting to remedy this situation Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft propose that continental Europe be viewed as a ‘hinterland’ in order to capture the ‘complex sense of the interplay of distance and involvement’ with transatlantic slavery (p. 4). This distance refers to a lack of widespread active pursuit of slave-trading or establishment of colonies built upon slave labour. Across the volume's eight chapters involvement in slavery is explored through a focus on individuals and firms who crossed national borders to play a role in the Atlantic economy, with occasional reference to the moral questions that this posed.

The material linkages between the European hinterland and slavery are demonstrated across a number of chapters dealing with mercantile and manufacturing concerns, though some ties to the Atlantic economy were closer than others. Those firms most actively involved in transatlantic slavery were the ones that provided the various manufactured goods necessary for the purchase of enslaved people on the West African coast. Peter Haenger, for example, explores how the trade in Indiennes (dyed cotton textiles) of the Swiss firm Burckhardt & Cie translated into investing in twenty-one slaving ventures. Other firms took the opposite trajectory, as Alex Robinson demonstrates in her chapter on the Earle and Rathbone families who established houses in Venice and Livorno in order to secure a supply of glass beads for their slave trading business. Both studies locate links to the slave trade in port cities (Venice and Nantes) which are not often considered in slavery histories.

Other chapters move further inland and away from the transatlantic trade. Chapters on German linen production and trade border on stretching the threads of Slavery hinterland to breaking point. German linens were both exchanged for slaves in West Africa and worn upon their backs in New World plantation. The integration of Silesia and the Wupper Valley into the Atlantic economy is welcome, but any suggestion of a moral hinterland is more tenuous. The debate over the relationship between transatlantic commerce and humanitarianism is long established, but most of the above chapters appear to make an implicit argument for the absence of such a connection despite attempts to reflect on the moral questions raised. Anna Overkemp notes a distinct lack of discussion of slavery in the correspondence of Abraham & Brothers Frowein, even as enslaved labourers unloaded their ships in Rio and St Croix. What is positively demonstrated is the role of family capitalism, in the form of small merchant firms and partnerships, in connecting European hinterlands to slavery.

Just as important as the family firm are individuals and Slavery hinterland comes closest to an exploration of the moral and cultural aspects of transatlantic slavery in its biographical chapters. These chapters are united by a focus on how personal and professional networks facilitated the creation and reception of knowledge about the Atlantic world. Johan Peter Oettinger is an example of this: his own perceptions of African inferiority, grounded in beliefs about race and gender, were formed whilst serving as a barber-surgeon in the Brandenburg African Company. These personal observations were later transformed when posthumously republished as an ethnographic novel justifying German involvement in the scramble for Africa. Sarah Lentz's chapter on the abolitionist Therese Huber explores how such concepts might be interpreted and disseminated at home. Of particular interest to readers of this Journal will be a discussion of how Huber drew on Pietist narratives of religious conversion in her own account of ‘conversion’ to abolitionism. Ultimately, questions of race rather than religion are most prominent throughout these chapters.

The boundary between slavery and its hinterland is most decisively collapsed in an outstanding contribution from Rebecca von Mallinckrodt on enslaved people in the Holy Roman Empire. At the chapter's heart is the case of ‘a Moor purchased in Copenhagen’ who in 1780 petitioned the Prussian king Frederick ii in an attempt to secure his freedom. Here Mallinckrodt provides a striking example of enslaved agency that is absent in the majority of the volume's chapters. The unnamed ‘Moor's’ claim to be an indentured labourer reduced to the status of a slave also effectively demonstrates that within the Holy Roman Empire slavery and freedom existed on a continuum of obligation and service, rather than as a strict binary. The rejection of the petition provided a legal justification for enslavement. Here slavery is no longer something that Germans profited from indirectly or learned about through travel writing, but something practised on a small scale: Mallinckrodt disproves the traditional claim that ‘There are no slaves in Prussia’.

The volume's afterword is appropriately provided by Catherine Hall, a scholar whose work on Britain and Empire ties together many of the strands running throughout Slavery hinterland. A focus on the role of family firms and the biographies of exemplary individuals have long been at the heart of Hall's work and these themes run throughout Slavery hinterland. The volume's greatest strength lies in revealing the myriad ways in which the profits, ideas and people involved in transatlantic slavery penetrated continental Europe. Many Europeans, and particularly Germans, were clearly materially and personally invested in slavery, though how morally interested the majority were remains doubtful. Slavery hinterland may be considered alongside the recent ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ project as a fine example of uncovering a slave past that had been previously, sometimes deliberately, obscured.