Daniel Domingues da Silva (Rice) and Edward Alpers (UCLA) join Moses Ochonu to discuss the process of building and interpreting a database of nearly 55,000 enslaved and freed Africans registered by Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique between 1856 and 1876. The conversation offers rich insights into the process of abolition, and possibilities for tracing deeper linkages between scholarships on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later forms of colonial labor coercion. The article ‘Abolition and the Registration of Slaves and Libertos in Portuguese Mozambique, 1856–76’ appears in the November 2021 issue of the Journal of African History.