"The Persistence of Slavery offers a wealth of information on child labor and trafficking in a key period of international concern about slavery . . . [T]he book provides a much-needed focus on African children's history and opens up new avenues of research."--Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"Chapdelaine argues in this well-researched book that child trafficking, child slavery, and other forms of coerced labor persisted in Nigeria beyond the nineteenth-century antislavery movement . . . [U]sing the same colonial records that earlier studies on the Women's War relied on, Chapdelaine's book successfully goes beyond them to establish how exploitation of children's bodies has remained significant to capital and wealth generation within Nigeria's socioeconomic arrangements."--Journal of African History

"The Persistence of Slavery is a major intervention in the scholarship on unfree labor in Nigeria and Africa more broadly, as well as in research on modern childhoods, gender, and the family."--Journal of Family History

"An important, original contribution to the history of child trafficking in the twentieth century, the history of children globally, and to Nigerian and West African history, in general."--Benjamin N. Lawrance, editor in chief of African Studies Review and author of Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling

"One of the few book-length studies on the history of children in colonial Africa, The Persistence of Slavery is necessary and timely. It will be a first choice for courses on African history and childhood studies."--Saheed Aderinto, author of When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958