The seven contributions contained in this collection address various forms of manumission throughout the American South as well as the Caribbean.

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible retentions of Africa among descendants...