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Sketches some major social developments in 20th-c. Dominican Republic, concentrating on the turn of the last century, the early decades of the 20th c., the Trujillo period, and the post-Trujillo era. Author pays special attention the the question of 'color', stratification, and identity and the relation between the country and Haiti. He concludes that the Dominican Republic has experienced many great changes, making society more complex and more stratified.

[First paragraph]C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. SELWYN R. CUDJOE & WILLIAM E. CAIN (eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. x + 476 pp. (Cloth USS 55.00, Paper US$ 19.95)C.L.R. James on the "Negro Question." SCOTT MCLEMEE (ed.). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. xxxvii + 154 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. KENT WORCESTER. Albany: State University of New York, 1996. xvi + 311 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)"Why is there no socialism in the United States?," asked the German sociologist Werner Sombart (1906:43) in a famous essay at the beginning of the present century. Immigrants, it is true, had brought socialist notions with them in the middle of the past century, and had caused some anarchistic wavelets in the 1880s; there had been radical protest movements such as the Grangers, and a fledgling third party like the Populists; there were famous social critics and Utopians like Henry George and Edward Bellamy, but - in striking contrast to other parts of the Hemisphere - a socialist movement of any political weight never came off the ground.

If "colonial politics" denotes the objectives of a metropolitan power vis-à-vis its colony, then, for purposes of this paper, we may define "colonial psychology" as the frame of reference that determines the attitudes of "metropolitans" vis-à-vis the "colonial problem." By "metropolitans" we mean the inhabitants of those Western societies that are linked to part of the non-West by the historical, political, economic and psychological ties that have always accentuated the dominance of the West. By "colony" we shall here mean only the areas with a multiracial population of which a white element considers itself so integrally a part that it feels itself more strongly associated with its own "colonial" society than with the metropolitan country of its origins.

Race and biologized conceptions of ethnicity have been potent factors in the making of the Americas. They remain crucial, even if more ambiguously than before. This collection of essays addresses the workings of ethnicity in the Caribbean, a part of the Americas where, from the early days of empire through today's post-colonial limbo, this phenomenon has arguably remained in the center of public society as well as private life. These analyses of race and nation-building, increasingly significant in today's world, are widely pertinent to the study of current and international relations. The ten prominent scholars contributing to this book focus on the significance of ethnicity for social structure and national identity in the Caribbean. Their essays span a period from the initial European colonization right through today's paradoxical balance sheet of decolonization. They deal with the entire region as well as the significance of the diaspora and the continuing impact of metropolitan linkages. The topics addressed vary from the international repercussions of Haiti's black revolution through the position of French Caribbean- and the Barbadian - to race in revolutionary Cuba; from Puerto Rican dance etiquette through the Latin American and Caribbean identity essay to the discourse of Dominican nationhood; and from a mus imaginaire in Guyane through Jamaica's post independence culture to the predicament of Dutch Caribbean decolonization. Taken together, these essays provide a rare and extraordinarily rich comparative perspective to the study of ethnicity as a crucial factor shaping both intimate relations and the public and even international dimension of Caribbean societies.