Slavery has been an accepted institution since antiquity, but the editors are interested in a less obvious consequence: bondage threw people from different cultures into shared space, in households, on plantations, in mines and quarries, and on shared ground in art and public memory.

Recent commemorations of Britain's 1807 and the United States' 1808 abolition of the transatlantic trade, together with the growth of Black Atlantic studies, renewed attention to the subject. Even so, Hormann and Mackenthun argue, what slavery implies for the study of cultural encounter remains largely unexamined, and the volume sets out to address that gap.

The essays come from several disciplines and take varied conceptual approaches, treating labor camps in ancient Palestine, early Christian slavery and its moral standing, Enlightenment writing about black revolution, and other subjects. Most are concerned with the human and cultural dimensions of bondage and with the sharp differences between its forms from antiquity to the twentieth century.