It seems rather strange to be reviewing a book first published some fifty-five years ago, given that publications are very much about the place and time in which they are conceived, researched and published. This book is therefore a historiographical snapshot of an early period in the emergence of a “West Indian” historiography in the research of slavery, the plantation and the enslaved. While styled as a work in his-torical sociology, this book was the first major treatment of the history of slavery in Jamaica, and joined other early histories produced by West Indian historians, notably, Hall’s Free Jamaica, 1838–1865: An Economic History (1959), the multi-authored (Augier, Hall, Gordon, and Reckord) Making of the West Indies (first published in 1960) and Goveia’s Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965). These publications represented essentially the emergence of a modern West Indian historiography, which placed the colonies and the region at the centre, marking a significant departure from the previous period in which the region’s history was largely from that of the per-spective of the imperial, and involved seeing the colonies as extensions of the British empire, with limited if any attention to the wider social context. This was a natural development as this reorientation reflected the post-independence period and the recognition of the importance of history for national development throughout the region. As elaborated upon by Howard Johnson in his detailed “Historiography of Jamaica”, decolonisation, and the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, was the social and economic context which helped to orient the focus to themes of “race, cultural identity, the slave past and links with Africa”.