extent, the English Caribbean colonies. Although I offer
some comparative materials from the Afro-American ex-
perience in North America, I have excluded more detailed
treatment of the United States because of the abundant
literature which already exists on this country. Knowl-
edgeable readers, however, will be aware that I have
consciously framed my questions and analysis around
many of the same historical issues and debates which have
informed recent historical analyses of the North American
experience.

In this study I have tried to incorporate the latest
research on the economics of slavery and the demographic
evolution of African slaves, my own particular areas of
investigation in my earlier work on Cuba, Brazil, and the
Atlantic slave trade. I have also sought to summarize for
the general reader much of the older research on Afro-
American culture and the evolution of the plantation
regimes in America, as well as the newer debates within
African history related to African slavery in the Americas.

The organization of the book is somewhat unusual in
surveys of this type, as I have tried to provide both a
chronological framework and structural analysis at the
same time. I felt it necessary in the first chapter to
distinguish slavery from all other servile labor institutions
and also to examine the origins of both the slave system
and the plantation economy as they emerged in the
context of Western European history. In the next five
chapters I deal with the slave economy and slavery as they
developed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the
16th until the 19th century. The stress here is on under-
standing the timing and causality of these developments
and examining the differing patterns of urban and rural
slave labor which emerged. The second half of the book is
more synchronic in nature, emphasizing the social and
political aspects of slave and free colored life and culture.
Even here, however, I am concerned with relating under-

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