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.

Scott's account of how slavery ended in Cuba sets aside two familiar explanations: that Spain abolished it from above, or that economic contradictions caused it to be abandoned. Emancipation appears instead as drawn out, incremental, and full of conflict, moving through a run of legal, economic, and social change.

Enslaved people themselves accelerated it. By flight, by legal action, by self-purchase, and by joining the nationalist insurgency, they forced the question and dismantled the institution piece by piece rather than waiting for it to be lifted.

Freedom left former slaves with altered but still narrow economic options. Some responded near the century's end by joining a fresh rebellion against Spanish power, this one ultimately successful. An afterword written for this edition returns to how tangled post-emancipation society was, and to recent shifts in historical method that open such questions to fresh treatment.