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Book Reviews -Alan L. Karras, Lauren A. Benton, Law and colonial cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 285 pp. -Sidney W. Mintz, Douglass Sullivan-González ,The South and the Caribbean. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xii + 208 pp., Charles Reagan Wilson (eds) -John Collins, Peter Redfield, Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii + 345 pp. -Vincent Brown, Keith Q. Warner, On location: Cinema and film in the Anglophone Caribbean. Oxford: Macmillan, 2000. xii + 194 pp. -Ann Marie Stock, Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-century art of Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 416 pp. -Ineke Phaf, J.J. Oversteegen, Herscheppingen: De wereld van José Maria Capricorne. Emmastad, Curacao: Uitgeverij ICS Nederland/Curacao, 1999. 168 pp. -Halbert Barton, Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, latin popular music, and Puerto Rican cultures. Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. xxi + 290 pp. -Pedro Pérez Sarduy, John M. Kirk ,Culture and the Cuban revolution: Conversations in Havana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xxvi + 188 pp., Leonardo Padura Fuentes (eds) -Luis Martínez-Fernández, Damián J. Fernández, Cuba and the politics of passion. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. 192 pp. -Eli Bartra, María de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The life of a black Cuban woman in the twentieth century. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 182 pp. -María del Carmen Baerga, Felix V. Matos Rodríguez, Women and urban change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1868. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xii + 180 pp. [Reissued in 2001 as: Women in San Juan, 1820-1868. Princeton NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers.] -Kevin A. Yelvington, Winston James, Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopa: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America. New York: Verso, 1998. x + 406 pp. -Jerome Teelucksingh, O. Nigel Bolland, The politics of labour in the British Caribbean: The social origins of authoritarianism and democracy in the labour movement. Kingston: Ian Randle; Princeton NJ: Marcus Weiner, 2001. xxii + 720 pp. -Jay R. Mandle, Randolph B. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xviii + 248 pp. -Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 414 pp. -James W. St. G. Walker, Maureen G. Elgersman, Unyielding spirits: Black women and slavery in Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:33:56PM via free access early Canada and Jamaica. New York: Garland, 1999. xvii + 188 pp. -Madhavi Kale, David Hollett, Passage from India to El Dorado: Guyana and the great migration. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 325 pp. -Karen S. Dhanda, Linda Peake ,Gender, ethnicity and place: Women and identities in Guyana. London: Routledge, 1999. xii + 228 pp., D. Alissa Trotz (eds) -Karen S. Dhanda, Moses Nagamootoo, Hendree's cure: Scenes from Madrasi life in a new world. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2000. 149 pp. -Stephen D. Glazier, Hemchand Gossai ,Religion, culture, and tradition in the Caribbean., Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (eds) -Michiel van Kempen, A. James Arnold, A history of literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch- speaking regions. (Vera M. Kuzinski This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:33:56PM via free access BOOK REVIEWS Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900. LAUREN A. BENTON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 285 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00, Paper US$ 20.00) ALAN L. KARRAS International and Area Studies University of California Berkeley CA 94720-2306, U.S.A. <karras @ socrates.berkeley.edu> Lauren Benton has produced a provocative and insightful monograph that merits a wide readership among scholars of the Caribbean region. The book's relevance to those who work in this field, however, might not be readily apparent. Indeed, only four or five pages of the text explicitly mention any part of the West Indies (e.g., the section on marronage, pp. 61-65). It would, however, be a mistake for Caribbeanists to ignore this book for that reason. Though Benton's arguments derive from analyses of case studies from Mexico to India and South Africa, and from Australia to the Ottoman Empire and Uruguay, all have some parallel in an Atlantic world with the Caribbean at its center. Benton locates her work firmly in a world historical context. She argues that colonial rule, along with the global order that emerged from it, was shaped not only by economie connections between societies but also by locally-specific cultural practices in negotiation with each other. As various legal systems encountered one another, they began to interact in ways that resulted in "global legal regimes." Benton defines this somewhat difficult concept as "patterns of structuring multiple legal authorities" (p. 6). The book takes us through a number of different examples to build a compelling case. The law, those who write it, those who enforce it, those who challenge its Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:33:56PM via free access 324 New West Indian Guide /Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 76 no. 3 &4 (2002) imposition, those who agree to live by it, and those who resist it were all engaged in a tremendous process that created a global legal order. Local culture certainly mattered, but in a way that might challenge many readers. This is decidedly not the story of creating a global regime in the same way as a global institution, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Rather, the book presents the rise of a global legal regime that allowed the "legal and political space for custom [to operate]" (p. 262). Benton at once accepts the idea of local conditions differentiating societies from each other and argues that the very process that led to differentiation was common to all societies, which, in turn, created a common global order. Though this concept is not intuitive, it nevertheless seems valuable and accurate. The creation of a global legal regime amounted to a series of historical contests. The first, or most basic, might have been between indigenous legal institutions and those brought by colonizers. (Since the Amerindian popula- tions of the Caribbean disappeared or dispersed fairly soon after Spanish col- onization began, it might be harder to recapture this region's history than that of others.) Tensions emerged between religious and secular authorities over whose idea of law and order would be applied. And just as these disputes began to wane, often through syncretic behaviors, a stronger European state emerged. The process of state formation and development is certainly essential to understanding Benton's argument. She claims that "state formation and the emergence of an interstate order are naturalized products of globalization" (p. 21). An extended discussion of this claim, woven throughout the text, would have made it easier for readers to grasp the characteristics, other than the law, of an emerging state. One fact, however, is crystal clear: this emerging state could, and did, engage in contestations with other states for supremacy. World historians have expressed this in terms of the rise of capitalism; Benton cor- rectly wants to make it more complex than that by thinking about legal and political supremacy. Modern Caribbean states did not simply spring from the colonialism of a particular European country. Indeed, many island colonies switched states, and legal systems, often more than once. So too do Caribbean states have a history of cultural pluralism. We have already seen a great deal of work on cultural exchange between masters and slaves, Europeans and Africans, with- in the institution of slavery. But there has not been a sustained investigation of the negotiations over how the law would be enforced, or even how it would be written, within the Caribbean colonies. Nor has there been much scholar- ly interest in thinking about how island residents of European descent inter- acted with island residents of another European descent. How did French Grenadians, for example, understand British Grenadians, and vice-versa? How did they adapt or change their legal systems with changes in state authority? Because the Caribbean is a "continent of islands," historically Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:33:56PM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 325 ruled from European metropoles, colonists often wrote or reinterpreted laws in unintended ways.1 That they had the ability or "space" to do this is exact- ly Benton's point. The Caribbean, thus, at the center of an Atlantic world, would test Benton's hypothesis and almost certainly provide fresh evidence in support of it. The book's argument is truly interdisciplinary. This is not simply, or even mainly, a narrative history. lts comparisons seem far too diffuse to organize in that way. Rather, Benton employs narrative in each case study alongside social science theories derived from anthropology, sociology, and even law itself. Doing so allows her to make a much stronger case for a more general applicability than just her specific cases. As a result, scholars who approach this book might initially find it daunting for its sheer breadth of knowledge, geographically and methodologically, but there is much to be gained by per- severing and thinking outside of normal disciplinary and geographic bounda- ries. If nothing else, Law and Colonial Cultures will force Caribbeanists to confront the world in which their societies were made. The South and the Caribbean. DOUGLASS SULLIVAN-GONZALEZ & CHARLES REAGAN WILSON (eds.). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xii + 208 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00) SlDNEY W.

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