Nineteenth-century East Africa experienced a first and last, rather than second, efflorescence of slavery. Legal abolition occurred late, between 1897 and 1922. Nevertheless, unlike in many other formerly slave-owning societies, most slave descendants here do not form distinctive, marginalized communities today. Still, they hesitate to acknowledge slave ancestry. This paper investigates the dynamics behind this ambivalent outcome. Comparing two regions in today’s Tanzania, it argues that the role of colonial-era integration into global commodity markets varied between locations, and while it contributed to the obsolescence of slavery, it was neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for ending slavery and mitigating ex-slave marginality. Rather, ex-slaves’ efforts to acquire unspoiled identities profited from a range of factors, including the chaos of conquest and the First World War, the political and economic repercussions of both these events, and later the depression, on formerly slave-owning elites, and the wide availability of new religious identities. Since a majority of ex-slaves in the region were women, much renegotiation of status occurred within households, relating to markets indirectly.

The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa (The Discovery of Europe). All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. They are critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head.