Chapter 4 examines Naipaul’s engagement with the legacy of slavery beginning with The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a remarkable example of a novelistic rendition of historical events based on Naipaul’s reading of nightmarish primary documents relating to the colonization of the West Indies and littoral Latin America. What surfaced in the creative history that he wrote is a narrative of failures and failed, egotistical heroes, and administrators who, living out their own fantasies, saw nothing aberrant in their treatment of the slaves they traumatized and condemned, and the Indians they dispossessed and then killed off. Before The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul had written his first travel book, The Middle Passage (1962), also discussed in this chapter. Naipaul returns to the theme twenty-five years later in A Way in the World (1994). The chapter examines the disturbing novel Guerrillas (1975), a dark book about fantasy-driven Black Power enthusiasts and, given the historical connections between Spanish and English slavery, a work on the American South, A Turn in the South (1989). The chapter makes the case that to Naipaul nations fail when they do not fully come to terms with their history.

Chapter 1 introduces the main topics of the book: theories about the invention of writing systems, the role of the individual in theories of creativity, and the importance of the indigenous alphabet known as Mandombe to provide dignity to the Kongo.

This analytical survey of key texts in contemporary urban Caribbean fiction and poetry from Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Santo Domingo and Pointe-à-Pitre explores several themes this literature holds in common: the postcolonial (or, in the case of Cuba, post-revolutionary) breakdown of the urban fabric and its attendant covert and more often overt violence, seen here in relation to the haunting and haunted after-lives of the plantation complex, along with the lived textures of daily life, with its unstable interplay of social anomie and possible emancipatory alternatives.

Jessup’s Transnational Law challenges the state as the sole maker of international law. Nevertheless, the doctrine of transnational law advocated for the disrobing of the newly gained sovereignty in Asia and Africa. American corporate lawyers used transnational law to expand their international commercial arbitration practice. Next, in disputes arising from the expropriations by new states of property acquired from concession contracts investors found transnational law profitable. Effectively, Transnational Law, restoring a colonial status quo, facilitated the post-war internationalization of contracts to develop the law of economic protection of aliens. It wantonly focused far too much on “contracts” forgetting conveniently its “concessional” nature. The doctrine of transnational law grew from the McNair-Lauterpacht School of thought that “exploited ungrudgingly and to the full” the “rules” of “private law for the purpose of the development of international law”. The Suez crisis inaugurated the American lawyer's putting of transnational law into practice.