Paulin Ismard, Benedetta Rossi & Cécile Vidal (eds.), *Les Mondes de l'esclavage: Une histoire comparée*. Paris: Seuil, 2021. 1154 pp. (€29.90)

This hefty paperback, affordably priced for a general French public, is an ambitious collaboration by the three editors (a specialist in ancient Greece, an Africanist, and an Americanist) and more than 70 contributors (15 nationalities). In his introduction, Paulin Ismard dates the beginnings of a new French interest in the role of slavery in its national past to "23 May 1998, when 40,000 citizens, most originally from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane or Réunion, marched from the Place de la République to Nation, under the auspices of the Committee for a Unitary Commemoration of the Abolition of the Enslavement of Negroes in the French Colonies [CM98]." This committee's activism, as well as that of other organizations, led, he suggests, to the "*loi Taubira*, which declared the Transatlantic Slave Trade and that in the Indian Ocean as well as slavery itself, 'a crime against humanity.'" (p. 7). This new volume, with the ambition to place slavery "at the heart of French history," appears exactly 20 years after the passing of that historic law.

The collection is divided into three sections: "Situations," "Comparisons," and "Transformations." The first roughly 200 pages of "Situations" include chapters on societies from Mesopotamia (ca. 1800 BCE) and India (500 BCE) to tenth-century Scandinavia and eighteenth-century Korea; the following 20 entries include five on slavery in the Americas—that is, 10 percent of the chapters in this section are on slavery in the Americas.

"Comparisons" is composed of chapters with such titles as "Culture," "Gender," "Resistance," and "Kinship," but in my view the attempt to explore these topics using a mix of ethnographic/historical bits of information from all over the world isn't always successful. (Orlando Patterson, in his conclusion to the volume, notes that "most of its chapters" are "meso-level history," neither microhistory nor macrohistory.) Nonetheless, some of these essays (particularly those by Cécile Vidal) draw effectively on a wide range of literature, and on the whole, the authors are impressively erudite.

"Transformations," less than 200 pages, begins with 50 pages of non-Atlantic chapters and ends with essays on reparations, memory, and contemporary slavery. Patterson's stimulating "Conclusion" begins with two graphs showing that the number of Anglophone books on slavery continues to increase (since their meteoric rise after the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement), while those in France, after a very late-twentieth-century spurt, have sharply declined.

The book concludes with four pages of maps and a 21-page "Bibliographie"— not the "references cited" that follow each chapter, but rather a kind of "suggested readings," divided into useful categories.

NEW WEST INDIAN GUIDE
*Les Mondes de l'esclavage* follows a number of English-language attempts (published by Oxford, Cambridge, Macmillan ...) to present the history of “world slavery.” One difference: the subject of Black resistance and marronage is treated less extensively than in most of the Anglophone volumes (understandably, perhaps, given the greater political pressures outside of assimilationist France)—Palmares, for example, does not appear in the extensive “Index of Places” at the end of the book. Another (this time salutary) difference is that slavery in Africa (including the book's epilogue by Léonora Miano) is more extensively treated than in the Anglophone volumes. And finally, this volume is more truly comparativist—stressing the diversity of slaveries—than its Anglophone predecessors, which tend to consist of articles on one country/region/period at a time, leaving most comparison to the reader. In any case, this pioneering contribution—one that I hope will be read not only by the general French public but also by those responsible for the education of future generations—is certainly welcome.

During the decade that Sally and I lived in Paris, we participated in CM98's activities, presenting lectures, joining marches, and attending its annual May 23 celebrations on the Place de la République, featuring free concerts by such bands as Kassav' and Tabou Combo. But by the time we left in 2019, we were aware that its active membership—which included many Antillean immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s—was aging (and its founding president, Dr. Serge Romana, was retiring), yet their ambitious plan, approved by President Hollande, for a memorial in the Tuileries Garden with the names (some 200,000) and communes of all the enslaved who were freed in 1848, seems in spring 2022 under President Macron, finally ready for realization. At the same time, there had been a marked diminution of publications relating to slavery in France. All this makes *Les Mondes de l'esclavage* particularly welcome, even if its sophisticated comparativist perspective (with its many chapters on China, Greece, India, and other far-flung places) might have the unintended effect of turning the spotlight away from the central role that France itself played in colonialism and slavery.

Richard Price

Coquina Key FL, U.S.A.

rixsal@gmail.com