Historians mostly in the US but also elsewhere in the Americas cast some welcome light on the little studied practice of freeing individual slaves while the practice and institution of slavery continued. Among the insights they provide is that manumission was not a disinterested practice that countered or even humanized slavery, but was a response to the needs of slave owners within their own societies and economies. The topics include metropolitan Spain and the Canaries in the 15th and 16th centuries, the limits of manumission for enslaved Africans in 18th-century British West Indian sugar society, sex and gender in Surinamese manumissions, the struggle of liberated Africans for final emancipation in Brazil from the 1840s to the 1860s, and the slave owner's family and manumission in the post-revolutionary Chesapeake tidewater. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)