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THE TAINOS: RISE AND DECLINE OF THE PEOPLE WHO GREETED COLUMBUS. By Irving Rouse. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. 211. $25.00.)
A HISTORY OF BARBADOS: FROM AMERINDIAN SETTLEMENT TO NATIONSTATE. By Hilary M. Beckles. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 224. $37.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.)
THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA, 1655-1796: A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE, COLLABORATION, AND BETRAYAL. By Mavis C. Campbell. (Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988. Pp. 296. 39.95.)
THE BONI MAROON WARS IN SURINAME. By Wim Hoogbergen. Translated by Marilyn Suy. (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990. Pp. 254. $60.00.)
ALABI'S WORLD. By Richard Price. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. 444. $59.90 cloth, $18.95 paper.)
CUBAN RURAL SOCIETY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF MONOCULTURE IN MATANZAS. By Laird W. Bergad. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. 425. $65.00.)
CAPITALISM IN COLONIAL PUERTO RICO: CENTRAL SAN VICENTE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Teresita Martinez-Vergne. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. Pp. 189. $27.95 cloth.)
THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM: RACE, LABOR, AND POLITICS IN JAMAICA AND BRITAIN, 1832-1938. By Thomas C. Holt. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. 517. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
Encounters in the Caribbean between indigenous peoples and Europeans after 1492 gave rise to an early version of comparative ethnography that had no sense of history. Meanwhile, traditional histories of the region had learned little from anthropology. Tragically, this region was one where Europeans rapidly destroyed the "others," replacing them for purposes of labor with enslaved Africans and indentured Asians on a massive scale. Thus for five centuries, the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Caribbean has been inseparable from the pervasive impact of the colonial process led first by Spain, then by several northern European powers, and more lately by the United States. The fact that the Caribbean has been an integral, although dominated, part of the "Western World" for so long has confounded the academic disciplines, which became compartmentalized in the nineteenth century. For traditional historians, the Caribbean has been no more than an aspect of imperial history, in effect a mere footnote. For most anthropologists, the peoples of the Caribbean were not "simple" or isolated enough to constitute the kind of...