Book Review

This journal's readers are well served by Beyond Slavery. Consisting of three case studies from across the Atlantic world, the book provides a powerful, if unsystematic, exploration of the connections between classical political economy, race, class, gender, and labor. The book suggests that the experiences of emancipated slaves in the British Caribbean, Cuba, Louisiana, and French West Africa are useful in understanding states rooted in universalist Enlightenment principles. The authors argue that "those societies that had gone furthest in linking the political-cultural role of the citizen to the state of the national economy offered . . . the greatest potential for slaves to become equal citizens and the greatest peril to that status actually being realized."

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The authors probe what it meant to be simultaneously black and legally free; freedom clearly had its limits. Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, and Frederick Cooper adeptly illuminate the gap between the states' language and their behavior toward freed people asserting their perceived rights. The universal terms "freedom" and "liberty" were not uniformly applied in the geographic areas covered here. Edmund Morgan's classic American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) presents an earlier, far less nuanced, depiction of the limits of freedom. In their respective essays, the authors challenge their readers to think in terms of historical process; doing so locates the Americas firmly within the discourse of world history.

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