Girard opens on an 1802 Guadeloupe census of hundreds of people described as belonging to the State: legally free under the abolition of 1794, yet catalogued with a price beside each name, called negre while planters were addressed as citizens, and reenslaved within months. The document poses his question. When France had outlawed slavery and the trade in captives, what should one call the traffic that plainly continued?

The traffic persisted in substance while the word was avoided. Ships under French captains supplied Saint Domingue out of Kingston; exiles took the people they owned overseas instead of freeing them; cultivators were kidnapped and sold in Santo Domingo; privateers landed recaptured Africans in Guadeloupe; officials shipped prisoners of war to Central America and the United States.

To sort cases Girard proposes three tests, asking whether a movement was voluntary, whether unpaid forced labour followed, and whether profit was the motive, and reads the era's shifting vocabulary as both cover and evidence.

Hall describes an exchange of knowledge in colonial Louisiana. Africans showed Native people how to fight against Spanish and French methods of warfare; Native people in turn guided Africans into the forests and swamps, where communities of the escaped took hold.

That mixing left descendants. White families with long roots in Louisiana frequently have African and Native American ancestors, though after a few generations the connection was seldom acknowledged, least of all on the African side.

On the question of Haitian influence Hall is careful. Enslaved people in Louisiana who organized against slavery during the Age of Revolutions drew some inspiration from Haiti's success and from the instability of the period, but no evidence ties Haitians directly to any Louisiana conspiracy or revolt. What Haiti did send was people: refugees whose arrival doubled the free population of color in New Orleans.

Law returns to a subject he treated in the same journal in 1977, extending and correcting that earlier account of how slaves reached the Atlantic trade from Dahomey.

Two questions organize it: how much came from local raiding rather than purchase from the interior, and how a group of private merchants emerged. Dahomey's kings first ran the trade as a royal monopoly fed entirely by raiding. From the middle of the eighteenth century the kingdom took up a middleman role, buying from the interior, and because the kings generally left that side alone a private sector formed.

Merchants began as state officials licensed to trade for the king or for chiefs, then won the right to do business for themselves as well. The shift from slaves to palm oil in the nineteenth century made them wealthier and more autonomous, and sharpened recurring conflicts with the monarchy over commercial policy and its seizures, divisions that weakened Dahomey against European imperialism.

Law explains the emergence of Lagos as the leading port of the Slave Coast by looking at where two commercial systems met: European shipping on the Atlantic and the canoe traffic moving goods through the coastal lagoons.

Sixteenth-century Europeans used the Lagos channel to reach Ijebu, buying slaves and cloth there, then abandoned the route in the following century. Lagos itself began as a fishing hamlet before Benin garrisoned it around 1600, perhaps to shut Europeans out of Ijebu and keep that trade for itself. Formal subjection to Benin lasted into the nineteenth century, but Benin's weakening during the eighteenth left the town independent in practice.

Law doubts the assumption that the lagoon route running west to Allada and Whydah predates European contact, treating it instead as a product of European interest drifting westward from Benin. Lagos exported slaves and Ijebu cloth from the 1760s; it became a major port only when Dahomey's military pressure pushed shipments eastward.

The kingdom of Allada dominated slave exports from the western Bight of Benin before Dahomey's conquests of the 1720s, yet its earliest phase has been treated thinly or misleadingly in the standard accounts. Law reworks the numbers, discarding decade-by-decade tabulation in favour of a periodisation drawn from the trade's own political history.

Two corrections follow. Portuguese activity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, judged negligible by earlier scholars, looks larger once the fiscal basis of the surviving valuations is read correctly; the mid-century Dutch and English trade, by contrast, looks smaller. Sustained growth begins only in the later 1670s.

Law also stresses how violently the traffic fluctuated year to year, disrupted by the Anglo-Dutch wars. That matters for interpretation: falling slave prices between the 1650s and 1670s accompanied stagnation rather than the expanding African supply earlier explanations assumed.