As a young anthropologist Mintz worked in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico; fifty years on he returns to those experiences and to the islanders who befriended him. The reflections trace what runs continuously through the three societies and what separates them, and show people bringing their own history to light.

He joins what he knows of each island's past — made by a meeting of peoples with few parallels anywhere in human experience — to how the people he met talked about their lives. In Haiti and Jamaica, he argues, creolization was an immense act of creation by the enslaved: cultures did not simply mix, they were rebuilt, with new hybrid institutions and meanings put where enslavement had left wreckage. Globalization, read this way, is far older than it is assumed to be.

The book gathers up Mintz's long work in the region.