Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (review)
Toward the end of the book, Diaz formulates the crowning thesis to her work: "Perhaps no other known subordinate group—at least in the colonial historiography of Spanish America—has made collective use of imperial judicial channels in such a consistent, exhaustive, and far-reaching way" (p. 286). The "far-reaching" may be correct in this case but, as the author recognizes, the sphere of the right and use of that right by "subalterns" (Indios, slaves, free colored people, etc.) has only begun to being investigated.