Edited collections come in various flavors—curated collations of teaching-oriented chapters, compiled (and hopefully refined) conference papers based on a particular topic, useless mishmashes, and festschrifts that celebrate and comment on the themes explored by a senior scholar. Luckily, this volume, edited by two excellent scholars represents the fourth and not the third option. Although not formally a festschrift, this volume reflects on themes commonly associated with Peter Kolchin, who wrote comparative studies that examine slavery and emancipation in the United States, on the one hand, and serfdom and emancipation in nineteenth-century Russia, on the other. Notwithstanding their debt to him, the contributors to this volume also manage (as the title promises) to lay out their own agendas for future research and publication.
Like Forret’s chapter about violence and theft in slave communities and Sears’ chapter about Christian sailors whom “Barbary Pirates” enslaved in North Africa, many of the contributions investigate...