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This study investigates the role of children's labor in Virginia and New York during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Free and enslaved children comprised part of the labor forces that built the economies and provided future generations of workers within these former European colonies. Childhood and Adulthood, as conceptual products of the European enlightenment, were employed by colonial and postcolonial elites to justify exploitation. Documentary analyses of Virginia laws, court cases, and indenture documents in Virginia are discussed in relation to femoral MSM frequencies in enslaved subadults of the New York African Burial Ground population. The author argues that the documentary and skeletal records demonstrate how race, class, and gender were constructed within the contexts of childhood, patterning children's labor and access to resources.

Frith and Hodgson’s opening chapter provides a broad overview of the memorialization of slavery in the Francophone world contrary to the lack of memorialization of other forms of labour exploitation. While introducing the chapters that follow, it foregrounds the overarching aims of the volume, which include the desire to transcend nation-centred memories and to question the limitations of the particular terminologies, iconicities and chronologies that frame memories of slavery. It thus provides an introduction to the multiplicity of memories of slavery in the Francophone world, while also moving beyond slavery towards other forms of colonial labour exploitation. It begins by addressing the problem of definitions of slavery and labour exploitation, before moving on to consider state-led commemorative discourses in a comparative framework. Finally, it stresses the need to move towards a more transnational approach to scholarship in slavery studies, while recognizing and exploring specific sites, histories and identities that have been shaped by the history of French-led slavery and its contemporary legacies.

In chapter eight, Srilata Ravi engages with the ‘double colonial heritage’ of slavery and indentured labour in Mauritius through literature as a form of cultural memory. The impact of ethnicized state policies that strategically manipulate, divide and apportion national memory between significant minority groups is evaluated through a reading of texts by Mauritian authors Marcelle Lagesse, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah, Barlen Pyamootoo and Amal Sewtohul. Noting that literature can play a double-edged role of both remembering and critical distancing from the politics of memorialization, Ravi seeks to determine how far Mauritian literature since the 1960s follows or deviates from the typical pattern of compartmentalization of memory that has divided public memorials to slavery and indenture on the island between the Hindu and Afro-Creole communities.

Chapter ten, by Inès mrad Dali, considers the obscured history of the black population of Tunisia, popularly considered to be descendants of slaves from the trans-Saharan trade, but many of whom descended from the migrant and indentured labourers who arrived in Tunisia in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. As this chapter demonstrates, both groups were stigmatized by their ethnicity and subjected to the harsh taxation policies of the French protectorate, as well as forced labour and debt slavery. The second abolition of slavery in Tunisian law, passed in 1890, was a response by the French protectorate to a scandal involving the colonial use of slave labour. This chapter thus deals with an episode of French colonial history that has largely been forgotten in both Tunisia and France, having been overshadowed by more prominent memorializations of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In this concluding chapter, Françoise Vergès offers a global overview of the politics of memory related to slavery and the slave trade across the Francophone world. She opens up a number of important questions that remain unanswered: why, given the proliferation of memorial initiatives, do they so often remain empty of real social content or function? Why are on-going racial hierarchies and socio-economic inequalities not addressed? Why does the institutionalized memorialization of slavery not recognize the myriad other legacies of brutal exploitation and colonial violence? This ‘political turn’ in Vergès’s work involves looking at slavery and indenture as part of a long history of European imperialism, predatory economics and racial cartographies, with the aim of opening up debate on social justice, equality and human rights, as well as calling for debate on reparations and public policy.

Emma Christopher’s chapter reveals the realities of freedom for Africans ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy from the Atlantic slave trade. She traces the lives of Sierra Leoneans through colonial records and recreates their pathways into coerced labour and military service. While paying attention to the changing policies of British governors in the colony, the chapter focuses on recovering the experiences of liberated Africans themselves. As such, Christopher shows how Sierra Leone, established as a beacon for freedom in the Atlantic world, came to characterise the ambiguous and abusive construction of freedom for Africans and freed people in the British Empire.

After abolition many tropical enterprises in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia relied on indentured or “coolie” labor. The “coolies” were mostly Chinese or Indian workers who had been recruited on contracts, or indentures, that bound them for three, five or even seven years. They were relocated from their own lands to Fiji, Mauritius, Cuba, Trinidad and other West Indian islands. The Society had taken up the campaign against coolie labor when it seemed to threaten the position of the freedmen in the West Indies. Often these protests were against the migrants as much as they were against the conditions of work. The BFASS were less sympathetic to the “coolies” than to the slaves, while they challenged the system as a whole.

The Society had taken an interest in South Africa after the war with the Boers had highlighted the position of the black Africans there. The Society joined in campaigns against Chinese Coolie labor in South Africa in the early century. Later, the Society fought for the rights of native laborers in the diamond mines. One issue that tested them severely was the proposal for reserved lands for natives. Philanthropists liked the idea of protecting the natives from exploitation, but the Native Lands’ Act passed in 1914 robbed them of much of the best land, reducing the Natives to the status of helots working in mines, returning to reserved areas. When the early African National Congress campaigned against the Act, the Society used its influence to strong-arm their delegates to accept it in London.