Giulia Bonazza's Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750–1850 has a straightforward and provocative thesis. She argues that an international abolitionist discourse flourished in Italy between 1750 and 1850, at the same time as homegrown forms of slavery persisted. This disjuncture, between an ideological commitment to abolition and a pragmatic continuation of multiple forms of slavery, defined the question of slavery and abolition in pre-unitarian Italy. Unlike Great Britain and France, for Italy slavery did not happen in some faraway colony – it happened at home. While enslaved people in Italy were small in number by the mid-eighteenth century, forms of slavery in the Italian peninsula evidenced a broad continuity with the past. In pre-unitarian Italy, the institution of slavery had withered but still remained.

Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States is one of a growing number of studies linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds, especially in terms of slavery. Bonazza claims persuasively that Atlantic intellectual currents mattered in Italy but that there was also a circulation of people between Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Through the web of slavery, Bonazza argues, the Mediterranean world was connected to the Ottoman world, the African world, and the Atlantic world (p. 104). Slaves came to Italy as prisoners of war, religious captives, and occasionally as captives from the transatlantic slave trade. Redemption, or the prospect of redemption, differed for different types of slaves.

The book consists of four main chapters, a preface and a brief conclusion. In the first chapter, Bonazza lays out the historiography of slavery in its Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts. The second chapter follows abolitionist debates about slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bonazza traces international treaties on slavery, from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1884, and follows the way in which international abolitionist currents of thought were reflected in Italian newspapers, annals, and books. The third chapter is grounded in empirical archival work. Bonazza identifies the presence of slavery and forms of captivity in six Italian cities on the western side of the peninsula: Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa. Focusing on these places, Bonazza examines such themes as the relationship between baptism and slavery, galley slaves, and the indeterminate border between slavery and serfdom. The fourth chapter explores the marginalisation and elision of Mediterranean slavery in Italian memory. Bonazza looks at the absence of slavery in Italian historiography despite the presence of captives in public monuments and paintings. Throughout the book, she also alludes to the link between abolitionism and colonialism, referring to the role of nineteenth-century British and French colonial conquests and that of Italy's own late nineteenth-century colonial aggressions in burying the memory of slavery in the peninsula. In the second half of the twentieth century, Italy wanted to forget its colonial past, so it forgot its slave-owning past too (p. 181).

Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States is replete with nuggets of insight, often buried in the text, suggesting a deeper understanding that is not developed. For example, Bonazza points out that enslaved people with black skin carried a lower value than non-black captives, or captives from the Levant, a fascinating observation that she restates but never analyses (pp. 132–3). What did it mean that black captives were worth less than non-black captives? What is the connection between race and status and the role of sub-Saharan Africans in the wider culture and workforce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What does the lower value of black slaves say about the interplay of Mediterranean and Atlantic slaveries? We never learn.

Bonazza has amassed a mound of evidence of the presence of slavery in the Italian peninsula in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, her chapter ‘Forms of Slavery in the Italian States’ reads more like a tour of archival holdings than an analysis of the varied forms of slavery in the six cities that she studied. The chapter is littered with sentences like ‘The sources confirm the presence of slaves in the Kingdom of Sicily, and especially in Palermo, into the first half of the nineteenth century’ (p. 129). Bonazza's archival sleuthing is impressive, and the examples are numerous, but they run together in a laundry-list fashion, sometimes two to a paragraph. The reader is whisked from one example to another without ever being given a breather to understand what it all means. What's missing from Bonazza's display of evidence is her analytic vision, her argument, her sense of how all of this holds together.

These critiques should not detract from the innovation of Bonazza's intervention. Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States is an important first step in a critical line of research and is valuable for scholars of Mediterranean slavery, Atlantic slavery, and pre-unitarian Italy alike.