"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