The objective of the workshop is to reflect on Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery and labour systems during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. This will provide an opportunity for participants to create a dialogue between research areas regarding the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in order to bridge the habitual but unjustified scholarly separation between the two geographical spaces. The intent is to focus on the physical qualities attributed to slaves, such as skin colour, gender, age, health condition, and strength, but also skills and ethnic origin, to see how the related taxonomies impacted on the types of work performed by the slaves and people of colour, as well as slaves’ market prices and the salaries of free workers of colour. The Mediterranean and the Atlantic areas are excellent observatories of the different geographical origins of the slaves and people of colour who worked there in the late 1700s and the 1800s: the Ottoman Empire, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and the Asian colonies. The case studies that the workshop will analyse are situated in European Mediterranean countries and the French and Spanish colonial empires. More specifically, we will focus on the Italian area, France and Spain as well as Cuba and the French Antilles.