This book is an international cross-disciplinary collection of essays, engaging critically in the historical and contemporary discourses of slavery. History, literary criticism, cultural and museum studies and international relations provide the main disciplinary fields and perspectives for a trans-historical investigation that interrogates both a wide time-span – two and a half centuries long – as well as complex and often thorny conceptual and/or historical nodes. As the post-2007 critical scenery records the significant expansion of research in the plural fields of slavery-related studies, this volume proposes to add to the present critical discussion, in the wake of the new critical directions suggested by recent scholarship.