This book brings together authors from different institutions and perspectives and from researchers specialising in different aspects of the experiences of the African Diaspora from Latin America. It creates an overview of the complexities of the lives of Black people over various periods of history, as they struggled to build lives away from Africa in societies that, in general, denied them the basic right of fully belonging, such as the right of fully belonging in the countries where, by choice or force of circumstance, they lived. Another Black Like Me thus presents a few notable scenes from the long history of Blacks in Latin America: as runaway slaves seen through the official documentation denouncing as illegal those who resisted captivity; through the memoirs of a slave who still dreamt of his homeland; reflections on the status of Black women; demands for citizenship and kinship by Black immigrants; the fantasies of Blacks in the United States about the lives of Blacks in Brazil; a case study of some of those who returned to Africa and had to build a new identity based on their experiences as slaves; and the abstract representations of race and color in the Caribbean. All of these provide the reader with a glimpse of complex phenomena that, though they cannot be generalized in a single definition of blackness in Latin America, share the common element of living in societies where the definition of blackness was flexible, there were no laws of racial segregation, and where the culture on one hand tolerates miscegenation, and on the other denies full recognition of rights to Blacks.

Europe 1783–1914 provides a comprehensive overview of Europe from the background of the French Revolution to the origins of the First World War. William Simpson and Martin Jones combine accounts of the most important countries with the wider political, economic, social and cultural themes affecting Europe as a whole, including:

 

• the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon
• the rise of industry
• the growth of nationalism
• the 1848 revolutions
• Imperialism
• Marxism and left wing movements.

"When Emancipation came in 1938, Blacks in Barbados imagined that the terms of their everyday lives would undergo radical change. Instead, an unrelenting landless freedom would be violently imposed upon a community whose conditions of life and work remained largely unchanged, on plantations that produced more sugar with less labour for below subsistence wages. It was the rule of the Great House that subverted the promise of Emancipation. This is the story of the post-Emancipation betrayal of 83, 000 Blacks in Barbados; it is also a narration of how these Blacks prepared for persistent resistance and civil war as the only means to effectively break the rule of the Great House and establish preconditions for genuine Emancipation. The battles over progress were fought on the plantations, in the streets, in the courts, in the Legislative Councils and wherever Blacks recognised sites to effect change. This chain of organised rebellion was linked to produce the 1876 rebellion. Against this background of 19th century popular protest and workers agitation, the modern labour movement, the anti-colonial campaign and the agitation for democratic governance came to maturity by the 1920s. The final breach in the walls of the structure of white supremacy was achieved in 1937 when, under the ideological leadership of Clement Payne, workers took to the streets and fields with arms. Professor Beckles argues that this unbroken chain of protest and political activity from 1838 to the 1937 Riots constitute the Hundred Year War against Great House Rules. It had taken a full century of struggle after emancipation to see, even at a distance, the freedom that was promised by the abolition of slavery legislation. Written in a clear, discourse style, the author succeeds in presenting the text as an accessible document for public consumption, rather than a dense academic work. "

In Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar Walton Look Lai offers the first comprehensive study of Asian immigration and the indenture system in the entire British West Indies―with particular emphasis on the experiences of indentured laborers in the major receiving colonies of British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Exploring living and working conditions as well as the makeup of immigrant communities and their cultures, Look Lai offers a "dialectical pluralist" model of Caribbean acculturation that contrasts with the more familiar "melting pot" or "pure pluralist" model.

"Paradise Overseas" presents a tour around the main themes of Dutch Caribbean history and its contemporary legacies. Drawing on wide expertise in Caribbean and Latin American studies, Gert Oostindie strongly posits a refreshing analysis of the Dutch Caribbean in a comparative framework which will be of interest to historians, anthropologists and political scientists alike. Rather than aiming at a comprehensive narrative, he offers a thematic discussion of topics such as the contrasts between Dutch colonization in the Americas and Asia; African slavery, Asian indentured labour and the shaping of plural societies in the Dutch Caribbean; the major contrasts between and within the six Antillean islands and Suriname; the different trajectories of decolonisation and their subsequent costs and benefits; and the changing significance of ethnicity and national identity both in the Dutch Caribbean and its diaspora.

Plantation Jamaica analyses the important but neglected role of the attorneys who managed estates, chiefly for absentee proprietors, and assesses their efficiency and impact on Jamaica during slavery and freedom. Meticulous research based on a variety of sources, including the attorneys' letters, plantation papers and slave registration records, provides rich quantitative and literary data describing the attorneys' role, status, range of activities and demographic characteristics. Higman charts both the extent of absentee ownership and the complex structure of the managerial hierarchy that stretched across the Atlantic. Detailed case studies compare the attorney Simon Taylor's management of Golden Grove Estate in the decade before the American Revolution and Isaac Jackson's control of Montpelier in the years immediately following the abolition of slavery. These examples provide a wealth of information about plantation life and labour, technology, trade, investments and profits. Higman also makes a unique contribution by investigating and describing several topics previously neglected, including the postal service, the history of accounting and the role of attorneys in the British I

During the first half of the twentieth century, both countries witnessed the advance of capitalism, translated into an aggressive police of development, with the exploitation of minerals, construction of railways and roads, urbanization and industrialization. Along with the economic development, Brazilian and South African society tried to take control of their society, meaning to control the population in order to maintain the status quo. For that end, racial definitions, classifications, theories and policies were fundamental. As the features of South African politics and policies of racial segregation emerged with new colors for the world after the end of the Apartheid regime, given the testimonies, the released documents and the new analysis, Brazilians have been pushed to face the problem of racial exclusion, unmasking its image as a racial paradise under the lights of new studies as well. Elaine Rocha uses novels published in both countries between 1912 and 1953 as a window from were one could see how cultural perceptions, policies and of racial differentiation were reflected in the everyday life. The analysis of the literary content, plus the authors' biographies, political ideologies and the problems they were facing and interacting, together with their intentions of affecting the lives of the readers with the tragedy they illustrated in their novels claiming for a change in the real world.

This work provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of return migration to the English-speaking Caribbean. Return migration has been studied primarily for the Hispanic Caribbean but little exists for the English-speaking region. The co-edited work brings together the scholarship of ten social scientists, many of them from the Caribbean, whose research is focused on the process. The phenomenon is discussed from several theoretical perspectives and includes indepth studies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, and St Lucia. It includes renowned scholars in the field such as Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, Margaret Byron and George Gmelch as well as younger scholars such as Frank Abernaty and Godfrey St Bernard.