_The Early History of Cuba, 1492 to 1586_. By I. A. WRIGHT. The MacMillan Company, New York, 1916. Pp. 390. This book begins with the discovery of Cuba by Columbus and ends with the raid of Sir Francis Drake in the West Indies in 1586, by which it was demonstrated that Great Britain ruled the sea and that the retention of the Spanish possessions in the New World required that they be provided with means of local defence rather than be left in the position of dependence on protection from Spain. With this change is connected the subsequent economic development of Cuba and the success of the Spanish colonial policy. In writing this book the author had an advantage over most historians in this field. It was compiled from documents now available at Seville, Spain. Miss Wright, however, did not use the documents found in other archives. What documents she had access to, however, are considered sufficient as they contain "letters and reports of the island's governors, of royal officials and lesser clergy, of municipal and ecclesiastical councils, of distinguished and humble citizens." This large collection, too, contains some of the documents copied by Munoz in his collection preserved at Madrid and some printed in the unsatisfactory series of _Documentos Ineditos_. The author, therefore, gives this book to the public as the only exhaustive treatment of Cuban history of this period, which has hitherto been published, despite the estimate we have placed on such works as those of De las Casas, Oviedo, Gomara, Solis, Bernal Diaz del Costillo, and Herrera. The introduction of slavery and the treatment of the bondmen, although not objective points in this treatise, are given considerable space. The slave trade was authorized in Cuba in 1513 and we hear of Bishop Ubite in the possession of as many as 200 slaves in 1523 and later of Bishop Maestro Miguel Ramirez with a license from the crown to take half a dozen slaves and two white slave women. The writer shows how the failure of the native captives to meet the demand for labor eventually led to declaration making them the free vassals of the crown and authorizing the enslavement of Negroes in sufficiently large numbers to make up the deficiency. It was necessary to issue another order rescinding the license of the slave-traders because of the fear of servile insurrection, should the slave population too far exceed that of the whites. This restricted importation of Negroes, however, did not prevent their uprising in 1533, which, however, was easily quelled, the four Negroes defending themselves to death.