Epilogue: Appreciation and Response: Historical Paths Forward from Here.

A historiographical introduction to slaving, worldwide, accents the productivity of the social sciences in expanding its study from the modern Americas to fully global scales, but also raising challenges to maintaining a single abstract definition for "slavery" applicable to increasingly diverse contexts. An epistemological shift to historical analyses built from human motivations and strategies, richly contextualized in particular times and places, characterizes the four innovative essays in this collection, which advance the field by historicizing early maritime slave trading in the southern Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]