Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Since 2000, there have been fewer studies released about the ‘formal aspects’ of the operation of colonial powers, such as Portugal, in the East during the Early Modern period. Prior, the fall of Communism, in the last decade of the twentieth century, gave a boost to liberal ideology, while research into topics related to autocracy or state apparatus have become unfashionable. The Portuguese role in the East is usually overlooked, being less high-profile than that of the Dutch or British. Drawing on unpublished materials from the Overseas Historical Archive, and other libraries in Portugal, this book considers Portuguese leadership and organization at home, where it pertained to the governance of the eastern colonies; as well as the formal and ‘soft’ instruments of state applied on the ground in these colonies in first half of the eighteenth century.

In Europeans and Africans Michał Tymowski analyses the cultural and organizational aspects of contacts of both sides on the West African coast in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and the creation of the image of ‘other’ – African for Europeans, and European for Africans.

National Colors analyzes the politics and practices of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American countries over nearly two centuries. It shows that, in addition to domestic politics, the ways that states classify their citizens are strongly influenced by shifting international criteria for how to construct modern nations and promote national development.

A challenging portrait of the Cape Verdeans in Portugal; it is the only ethnographic study of its kind. Lu's Batalha focuses simultaneously on former colonial subjects-cum-labor migrants and the elite, former colonialist, strata of society. The result of this comparative study lays bare the socio-cultural dynamics of race, gender, and post colonialism in the Cape Verde community.

Published in 1998, this volume presents legal, religious and demographic aspects of the transfer of European family organisations to new environments in the overseas colonies, and illustrates the impacts of contact with other ethnic groups. In Africa the focus is on the Cape, the principal area of European settlement in the 17th-18th centuries; in the Americas the analysis includes indigenous and black families. Inheritance, dowry, marriage, divorce, illegitimacy are topics covered, but the emphasis is above all on women's roles and voices.