This book comprises three sections. The first, representing almost half of the whole, is a text by João Pedro Marques, under the title ‘Slave revolts and the abolition of slavery: an overinterpretation’: this is a translation of a book published in Portuguese in 2006, although the reader has to wait until page 186 for this to be explained (and even then, the original title, Revoltas Escravas: Mistificações e Mal Entendidos, is not cited). Marques's text is followed by nine brief ‘commentaries’ by other distinguished scholars of slavery and the slave trade (including, in addition to the editors, John Thornton, David Geggus, Peter Blanchard, David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, David Brion Davis, Robin Blackburn, Hilary Beckles); and, finally, ‘Afterthoughts’ by Marques, responding to these commentaries. The debate revolves around two issues that are strictly distinct, though sometimes conflated – how far (if at all) resistance and rebellion on the part of the enslaved contributed to the abolition of slavery; and how far (if ever) such resistance and rebellion was ‘abolitionist’ in motivation, in the sense of seeking to overthrow slavery as a system, rather than merely liberation (or improved conditions) for those actually involved. Marques proposes negative answers to both questions: slave rebellions generally played little role in achieving abolition and seldom envisaged the complete abolition of slavery, and the exceptional cases where they did (Saint-Domingue in 1791–4, Jamaica in 1831–2) interacted with, and reflected the influence of, European abolitionism. The ‘commentaries’ mostly support this interpretation, though with some exceptions (notably Beckles) and several detailed qualifications.

There is little African material in this. Marques devotes a page and a half to the abolition of slavery in Portugal's African colonies (pp. 58–9); Eltis and Engerman make passing reference to the flight of slaves into the European colonial enclaves that already existed in the nineteenth century (p. 146). But there is nothing on the colonial abolitions of slavery in the twentieth century, although these raise similar issues about the relative importance of the agency of the enslaved (as e.g. in the Banamba slave exodus of 1905) and the initiative of the colonizers. The ‘commentary’ by Thornton is entitled ‘Africa and abolitionism’, but in fact only two pages deal with conditions and events in Africa (pp. 97–9). Thornton's concern is to show that, in Africa also, slave resistance and rebellion commonly had more limited objectives than complete abolition; this is seemingly offered as a comparative observation only, though it might be inferred that enslaved Africans' prior experience and knowledge of slavery in Africa influenced their expectations and actions in the Americas.