Three historians take up one problem from three vantage points: what happened after slavery ended, for the people freed, for those who had owned them, and for the societies that held both. The premise is that treating emancipation as the tidy close of an evil institution skips the harder part, the questions and struggles that opened once slavery was gone.

Holt works on Jamaica, where the contested meaning of citizenship became the ground on which freedom was defined and defined again. Scott follows southern Louisiana and Cuba, tracing tangled conflicts and the alliances that formed across racial lines. Cooper turns to French West Africa and the point where emancipation met imperial ambition.

A jointly written introduction pulls the cases together around citizenship, labor, and race in the years after emancipation, pointing toward a fuller reckoning with what freedom was taken to mean.