Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World. Edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 274 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN: 978-0-520-25206-6), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 978-0-520-25207-3). Many Middle Passages addresses multiple audiences, at multiple levels, on a range of historical subjects. Contributors are established scholars from the United States, Australia, Britain and South Africa, and essays introduce readers to: African and Malagasy people taken to the Americas or across the Sahara; Arab slave caravans transiting East Africa en route to Zanzibar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Reunion; Southeast Asian slave raiding networks; German military conscripts shipped to the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia; penal transport to Australia and Southeast Asia; Chinese and Irish contract laborers in the United States during the 1860s; the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba and Peru; the western Pacific “blackbirding” trade; and Chinese trafficking in women and children throughout Southeast Asia. The editors situate the book at the crossroads of several ongoing projects, including calls to “create a global past” (Manning 2003), and works that place coerced and free migrations in global perspectives (Eltis 2002). Essays cohered more specifically around “a cluster of ideas” laid out in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). First, “that the rise of capitalism from the late sixteenth century onward forced millions of expropriated people to make middle passages from Europe and Africa to the Americas” (p.2). Second, that “the epitome of these middle passages, that of the Atlantic slave trade, might be used to explore other social and cultural transformations that resulted from …