Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico. By David M. Stark (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2015) 272 pp. $74.95 cloth

In this important book about the enslaved population in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puerto Rico, Stark breaks new ground by using long-established methodologies. His main argument can be summarized briefly. In the mid-colonial period, Puerto Rico’s (and likely the entire Spanish Caribbean’s) livestock-centered (hato) economy allowed slaves the opportunity to form stable families, resulting in a slave population that not only reproduced itself but was also rapidly growing. His findings compel a revision of prevailing wisdom about slavery in the Caribbean. With good reason, historians have regarded Caribbean slave societies as exceedingly brutal, characterized by high mortality, skewed gender ratios, and low fertility, which could be sustained only through continual, massive imports of African captives. But these generalizations, largely correct for the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when sugar was king, were wrongly understood to apply to all of the Caribbean, all of the time. Stark is among the...