As Peter Way observes in his preface to this collection, “for the current generation of leftist historians, Atlantic history fulfills the role that the history of the working class did for the progeny of E.P. Thompson” (vii). But while the Thompsonian tradition of labour history tended to emphasize the local and the regional (recall Thompson’s clarification in the introduction to The Making of the English Working Class that he neglected Scottish and Welsh history out of a respectful reluctance to generalize beyond the English experience), the history of Empire requires a much broader canvas. This collection, which includes seven essays covering a geographically and temporally diverse range of topics from the four major European empires, attempts to bridge that gap. Specifically, it explores the complex historical relationships between European capitalism and imperialism, doing so through the theme of unfree labour.

This theme complicates and enriches our understanding of the distinctions between state and market, public and private. For example, states collaborated with non-state and quasi-state entities such as the chartered companies, which functioned as much more than private firms and were in many places the leading edge of the expanding world of European capitalism. Chartered companies were political entities as much as they were commercial ones, in some instances negotiating formal treaties with Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in addition to their primary function as a commercial entity. And, by securing valuable natural resources, companies provided a competitive advantage for their home country in its imperial rivalries.

Along these lines, Pepijn Brandon and Karwan Fatah-Black’s essay challenges historian Pieter Emmer’s view that the United Provinces’ expansion was primarily commercial by showing how the state and the chartered Dutch West Indies Company were two sides of the same coin of Dutch imperialism. And in Evelyn Jennings’ sweeping survey of the role of coerced labour in the Spanish empire from contact to the end of the nineteenth century, we see how the Royal Company of Havana was granted access to the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for building ships for the Spanish Crown. The company used a combination of waged and slave labour to build the ships, a telling example of unfree labour’s reciprocal role between capitalism and empire.

One of the real strengths of Building the Atlantic Empires is the way it tries consistently to push past the binary of free/waged and unfree/slave labour, emphasizing instead the many variations located on a wide continuum between the two poles. We can see this, for example, in the way the editors (although none of the authors) deploy the term “reproductive labor”. Of course, the term reproductive labour is more commonly used to refer to unpaid domestic work such as caregiving or cooking, which, because it occurs in the household sphere, is outside the market and therefore not counted in conventional economic terms. In Marxian economics, this labor is what allows society to reproduce itself, socially and economically. Here, however, the term is used to refer to the ways in which empires reproduced themselves: building, maintaining and defending the imperial settlements and infrastructure required for empires to expand into the New Worlds. Such unpaid work often took forms—slavery, indenture, penal servitude—requiring state coercion. This point is ably made by James Coltrain’s essay on the construction of the Saint Augustine fort in Florida beginning in the 1680s. In other words, demand for unfree labour was driven by the combined expansion of the market economy and the European empires. Moreover, Elizabeth Heath’s excellent study of post-emancipation Guadaloupe, which shows how global economic forces led French colonial officials to undo the new freedoms and restore elements of a slave economy, instructs us to pay attention to the persistence of unfree labour in the Atlantic empires, sometimes in residual forms, even after slavery had formally ended.

Indeed, the role of the state in the mobilization of unfree labour is emphasized throughout this collection. For example, John Donohue shows how coerced labour, on a massive scale, was essential to England’s imperial exploits. In the wake of the English revolution, the state conscripted poor men into military service, which allowed it to colonize Ireland and fight an expensive war with the Dutch. Donohue traces how English legislation then facilitated further rounds of incorporation of indentured laborers into the imperial project, with thousands of poor British and Irish people being sent to work as chattel slaves in the Caribbean. As the English state asserted sovereignty over colonies and greased the wheels of the Atlantic slave trade, it simultaneously exerted legal controls over poor English bodies. Similarly, Anna Suranyi shows how the rapid expansion of the plantation economies in the seventeenth century led England to reorganize its transportation policies around sending “superfluous” populations to provide unfree labour to the colonies.

Rafael Chambouleyron’s study of the policies regarding Indian slavery in the Portuguese Amazon shows how Portuguese imperialism and the slave trade were closely intertwined with the provision and control of labour. More broadly, it reminds us that the dynamics along the colonial frontier, in the zones where a state had a presence on the ground but had yet to establish formal sovereignty, echoed back to the metropolitan center.

Canonically, historians of capitalism focused on Europe as the economic and cultural center of gravity. In their version of events, capitalism was born in the factories and mills of rural England. Industrialization allowed Europeans to gain footholds in global trading networks, and eventually to create their own empires throughout much of the world. Recently scholars have used Atlantic History to attribute world-historical change to mutual influences among various regions and cultures, rather than the simple imposition by a more “advanced” Europe on the rest of the world. Its focus on the edges of empire makes Building the Atlantic Empires a valuable contribution to the scholarship.