Author Description

"The ten essays deal with colonial Spanish America, Surinam and Curacao, colonial Brazil, the French Antilles, Saint Domingue, Jamaica, Barbados, the North American slave states, Cuba, and nineteenth-century Brazil.... One also gets a strong sense from these papers of the rich variation within each society.... An important book."—Journal of Southern History "A distinctive contribution to the enticing but treacherous domain of comparative history. It succeeds because it is written by qualified scholars who address a delimited, manageable subject.... The task was to canvass current knowledge and pinpoint areas of needed research regarding two topics: first, the experience of the free colored as a measure of the character of slavery and race relations; second, the fundamental roles of this group in the evolution of the respective societies."—American Historical Review