Our collective project, involving more than 20 historians of France, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany, investigates the policing of black populations in eighteenth century Europe, the first study to do so on a continental scale. The legal status of different categories of “gens de couleur” and enslaved people has been well studied in the French regime of the “Police des Noirs”, policies stretching from 1716 to the French Revolution that sought to control, sanction and ultimately to physically detain or deport people of color in metropolitan France. New studies have begun to investigate other jurisdictions of the European continent, shedding much greater light on how these shifts in the economy of racial classifications shaped lived experience for those specifically targeted as Black or enslaved, and for all populations in Europe, in the period from 1685-1815. We are working together to produce something more than a collection of individual case studies, and we collaborate to map out our categories of analysis and co-write introductions to each section, while seeking to maintain a transnational lens in all parts of the work. This roundtable will focus on key theoretical, methodological and practical problems arising in these new models of research, transnational collaboration and collective intellectual endeavor, and we invite full participation from the audience in our conversation.