"Finally! U.S. scholars and students interested in a fuller, more complex understanding of blackness in the Americas will have English-language access to Franklin J. Franco’s seminal account. Blacks, Mulattos and the Dominican Nation is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the relationship between slavery-based capitalism, competing colonial projects, and the development of racial systems and ideologies in the Americas. As importantly, Blacks, Mulattos and the Dominican Nation reminds readers that anti-Haitianism and negrophobia provide as much evidence of unremitting black freedom struggles on the island, as of the pathologies of white supremacy in the Hispanic Caribbean."
— Ginetta E. B. Candelario, author of Blacks behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity
"Franco’s classic study positions blackness as central to the evolution of Dominican national identity, and demonstrates the challenges black freedom and equality posed in the development of both popular and elite notions of citizenship."
— Glenn Chambers, author of Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940
"The reissue of Franklin Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos and the Dominican Nation demands a new look at the African base of the Dominican Republic, and the vexed question of race in that country. It brings to light long held silences of racial oppression, and turns accepted notions of history on its head. At a time of deep misgiving between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the book reveals a fascinating account of the impact of Toussaint Loverture’s presence in the Dominican Republic and his contribution to the development of a consciousness of the Dominican nation. This is a must read for Caribbean scholars."
— Linden F. Lewis, Presidential Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University, past President of the Caribbean Studies Association and editor of the anthology Caribbean Sovereignty, Development and Democracy in an Age of Globalization
"Franklin J. Franco’s analysis challenged the idea that Hispanic benevolence birthed racial harmony when he made enslaved people, violence, and plunder central to Hispaniola’s colonial history. Franco can now assume his well-earned place among English-language scholars who broke new ground in the study of slavery and the African Diaspora in the Americas."
— April J. Mayes, author of The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity
"Written in 1969, Franklin Franco’s book remains an important synthesis of Dominican history during the colonial and Haitian periods. It illuminates Santo Domingo’s place as an extraordinary part of the Afro-Caribbean world: its role as the first slave plantation society in the Americas (in the 1500s); its mostly enslaved, maroon, and African-descended population since that time; and its political integration with Haiti, which was embraced by many Dominicans as a more liberal and modern nation during the early 1800s. A new introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant situates this classic work beautifully and expansively in Dominican historiography."
— Richard Turits, author of Foundation of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History
