This is a superb work of scholarship that will attract attention from student s and scholars. Menard brings forward new archival data and draws upon a very, very large range of secondary sources. It will be essential reading for the history of the Caribbean and of the Americas more generally, as well as the study of slavery and African American life. -Stanley. L. Engerman, University of Rochester Intending at first simply to do further research on the mid-seventeenth-century isugar revolutioni in Barbados, Russell Menard traveled to the island. But once there, he quickly found many discrepancies between the historical understanding of the way in which this irevolutioni fueled the institution of slavery and the actual, quotidian, records documenting the prominence of slavery on the island even before sugar spurred its economic growth. In Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados, Menard reveals that black slaveryis emergence in Barbados actually...