Herbert Klein’s interest in the likenesses and dissimilarities that marked the various slave societies of the Americas spans some two decades, and was most notably expressed at the level of monographic research with the 1967 publication of his Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba. With the welcome appearance of the present volume, Klein has reached another milestone in his career.
This work is the first modern comprehensive comparative study of the experience of African slaves in the Spanish-, Portuguese-, and French-speaking regions of America, and to achieve greater understanding of the subject Klein has also included much material for the Dutch and English Caribbean colonies. In addition, where appropriate he makes reference to the ample historical literature on the Afro-American experience in North America, and many of the questions and analyses that fill this book have been framed around the issues that have animated students of North American slavery.
Klein’s command of a historiographical literature that approaches abundance is evident in the lucidity and skill used to maintain a balance between the simultaneous needs for a chronological framework and structural analysis of complex issues that range from slavery and the plantation economy to life, death, and the family in slave societies. Appropriately, the apogee of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within the context of the plantation economies of Brazil and the Caribbean islands receives the most space in the volume, but this is not to say that other areas or periods are slighted, and Klein is particularly mindful that African slavery was also an urban institution. Informative chapters are devoted to slave resistance and rebellion, freed slaves in a slave society, and the transition from slavery to freedom, while what we know about the slave community and Afro-American culture is treated with deft insight.
The interested student could ask for no better introduction to the subject of African slavery in Latin America, and Klein provides informative and extensive bibliographical notes for further study. The specialist is also in for a pleasant surprise. Though in a strict sense Klein provides us with no “new’’ data, extant monographic materials are artfully juxtaposed to reveal a greater sum of knowledge than a survey of individual historiographical parts might indicate. This is Klein’s greatest accomplishment, and African Slavery should be a standard work for many years to come.
