In the circum-Caribbean, nuclear and extended families played an important role in moving people out of slavery and in protecting them from legal and social discrimination. Some of the families studied in this volume were virtual representations of the colonial social order, including the free, the enslaved, white and black. The economic status of family members ranged from slaves without property to planter elites.

While miscegenation facilitated manumission for a few, particular for women of colour in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue, more important was the support of other black and coloured family members. This volume examines free black communities in Senegal, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Cuba, Saint-Domingue, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Suriname to compare the genesis of a free black class within Senegalese, British, French, Spanish and Dutch slave systems.