Review of Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, ed. Henri Médard and Shane Doyle

This new edited volume of essays by a remarkable collection of scholars is notable for its insights into unfree labor and trade in people in a region wholly separate from the Atlantic World that is, the main reference point for most people's conception of slavery. With few exceptions, the essays are excellent historical essays that provide a broad introduction to the Great Lakes region through the lens of slavery. Its geographical focus, in what is now Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Eastern Congo, helps connect the history of slavery in Africa to debates going back to classical texts of Greece, Rome, Judea and Arabia, by re-engaging debates about the definition of slavery. As many scholars have noted, American chattel slavery was a historical outlier. The forms of domestic, military, and aristocratic slavery common in pre-colonial Africa accord more closely with slavery in most other times and places.