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The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation

research monograph is a source of frustration because Diptee presents us with a range of important issues, many of which require fuller analysis. For example, the so-called ‘seasoning process’, undergone by enslaved people in their first months in the New World, might have received more detailed attention. The same could be said about the book’s discussion of the complex process of marketing enslaved Africans in Kingston, the main entry point to Jamaica for enslaved Africans. Moreover, Diptee draws our attention to the plurality of Africans’ reactions to New World slavery and, in the process, raises questions about how this led to fragmentation within communities of enslaved people and about how such dissonance intensified or gave way over time. The book also poses difficult points for scholars to consider about how far Jamaican slaveholders were able to turn newly arrived captives into a productive and controllable workforce. In raising these questions and going some way towards answering them, From Africa to Jamaica makes an important contribution to our understanding of Jamaica as an Atlantic society that was shaped by its links to different regions of West Africa. This focus on the African elements of Atlantic Jamaica is particularly timely and important in a field that has come to be dominated by scholarship on metropole–colony relations. As such, this book ought to be read widely and provoke further research by scholars interested in Jamaica and the Caribbean, and their place within the Atlantic world.