In her analysis of the artistic and iconographic representations of the antebellum and Civil War slave trade, Maurie D. McInnis offers a new barometer in which to measure the growth of abolitionism in the United States and Great Britain. Considering images from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (focussing on 1852 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861), McInnis examines the artistic production and public consumption of these images on both sides of the Atlantic, and their impact on the enduring struggle for emancipation. Chronicling the thematic, topical and aesthetic developments in depictions of transatlantic and domestic slave trading, selling and auctioning, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade provides a nuanced examination of the nexus of visual culture and politics on the eve of the Civil War.

Charting British artist Eyre Crowe's tour of the United States with William Makepeace Thackeray, McInnis assesses the progression of an individual artist's work and career as impacted by his experience with American slavery. Through the journey of Eyre, McInnis reconstructs the slave-trading enterprises of Richmond, Charleston and New Orleans and the ways in which images of these slave markets informed the greater transatlantic abolitionist movement. In exploring this exchange of images, in addition to ideology and written texts, McInnis provides a strong contribution to the existing body of scholarship on nineteenth-century visual cultural history, most significantly to the work of Marcus Wood.

One of the most impressive features of Slaves Waiting for Sale is its vast collection of reprinted images used to reconstruct these antebellum cities (139 in total) spanning a diverse scope of media – book illustrations, engravings, newspaper advertisements, anti-slavery materials, city maps, building architectural studies, and so on. A number of items from the collection are more obscure and only recently excavated, including several sketches and texts from the Illustrated London News and various items from slave auction houses in the South, which will undoubtedly be valuable to future scholarship on slavery in the region.

McInnis meticulously reconstructs the topographical landscapes of these cities, centralizing issues of architecture and city planning to the sustainability of the slave trade. The re-creation of antebellum Richmond is particularly detailed and thoroughly researched and has subsequently been integrated into the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, Hidden Patterns of the Civil War, increasing the accessibility of this material outside academia. The book's extreme attention to the detail of the cultural, political and economic dimensions of the domestic slave trade and its introduction of a variety of new primary source material to the historiography make McInnis's work especially complementary to Walter Johnson's pioneering book Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999).

However, despite the book's vast collection of prints, black artists and black productions are largely underrepresented. Admittedly, there was an extremely small selection of black artists in nineteenth-century America, but the oeuvre of Robert Duncanson, commissioned to paint works for Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853, and Edmonia Lewis, generally regarded as the first African American woman sculptor, would be particularly relevant and useful additions to this study. The inclusion of art production and consumption by blacks would offer a more comprehensive survey of nineteenth-century art culture, and would offer an alternative lens to critique the white, androcentic dominance of this sphere of influence.

Overall, this work offers a cogent, nuanced framework to analyze the economic and political debates surrounding slavery and emancipation in a transatlantic context. Given its strong interdisciplinary focus on the interplay between art culture and the institution of slavery, this work would be of particular interest in a number of fields, namely African American studies, American studies, art history and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American history. Its showcase of new and diverse primary source material, fashioned into a compelling case for the centralization of art in the study of the American slave trade, asserts Maurie D. McInnis's Slaves Waiting for Sale as a critical and necessary contribution to current scholarship on American slavery.