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Eric Allina. 2012. Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Mozambique. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 255 pp.
Eric Allina's book about forced labor regimes in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique bears more than merely titular similarities to Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). Both volumes document the intimate relationship between global capitalism and race-based systems of slavery, but the respective regimes under the microscope also seem reflections of each other-government and private corporations acting as one; random arrests, usually for such crimes as "vagrancy" or lack of identification, to make worker quotas; the long and deadly hours of toil in mines or on plantations. Just as Blackmon's book brought to greater public awareness the de facto continuation of slavery in the post-Civil War American South, so does Allina make a most worthy contribution to the growing body of literature on slavery and its profits in the European-occupied spheres of Africa.
Slavery by Any Other Name, in fact, is the first book to make use of the archives of the Mozambique Company, a collection of papers accidentally...