Four important new books, two by established scholars, two by recent Ph.D.s, cast significant new light on a watershed in modern history—the transition from slave to free labor. In different ways, these works all probe how and why the transition occurred, what consequences it had for slaves and postemancipation societies more broadly, and what freedom would come to mean in the modern age. Three of the books focus on the creation of new labor regimes following emancipation in areas of capitalist investment and production far from the centers of the capitalist order. They show how ideas about work and other aspects of culture developed at the center were inscribed onto colonized and other marginal peoples, and how the resistance of such peoples prompted a reformulation of metropolitan thinking about race that justified denying former slaves and many other workers basic rights of citizenship, in the interest of teaching them civilized values. The books reviewed here all illuminate in provocative new ways discourses about work and freedom, race and citizenship, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and domesticity—among the most fundamental problems of the modern era.