Celebrants of an ever-emerging 'globalization' fly the banner of free trade, the mass marketization of once faltering economies, and rising economic and social standards for all. Many opponents to globalization rightfully point out that borders still exist largely for the purposes of keeping one 'commodity' in its place: the labor commodity or, the more familiar, immigrant. Arguments of this type are often steeped in economic and social discourse. Race and ethnicity are seen as either being subsumed by this discourse or are entirely ignored as incidental to this type of political thought. In Ethnicity, Class and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions specialists writing on the Caribbean form of the nation-state place race and ethnicity along with class in its proper context: at the very foundations of the modern nation. Editor Anton L. Allahar has handpicked scholarship that is both contemporary and expert in its consideration of Caribbean geo-politics. Furthermore, essays in this volume include comparative cases from around the globe. In the interest of locating race and ethnicity as sociological and political categories that are inimical to contemporary conceptions of the nation state, Allahar explores spaces other than the Caribbean. The result is a comparative study that is unique in scope and also in its level of scholarly reflection. This book is the first of its kind. It is essential reading for anyone interested in advancing their analysis of political, economic, social, and cultural thought in the Caribbean."

This biography of Mayer Matalon, an influential Jewish Jamaican, traces his path from humble origins to innovator, public servant, political insider, and leader of his family's conglomerate, from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Mayer Matalon was not born into the Jewish-Jamaican elite who traced their ancestry in Jamaica back hundreds of years and who were successful entrepreneurs, prominent intellectuals, and politicians. Mayer Matalon's father, Joseph, was one a handful of Jews who came to Jamaica in the wave of turn-of-the-century Levantine emigration, and his mother, Florizel Madge Matalon, was a young, beautiful, poor Jewish-Jamaican girl. A failed businessman, Joseph's legacy was nine children who created their own legacy in Jamaican business and politics. The Matalon siblings built a conglomerate, venturing into businesses and experimenting with business models that had never been tried in Jamaica, enjoying success for the first twenty years, struggling to retain viability for the next twenty years, and fighting to keep the family together throughout. Matalon rose to wealth and prominence through his talent for numbers, his innovative ideas, and his extraordinary emotional intelligence. He was one of Prime Minister Michael Manley's closest confidantes, in and out of power, and he advised every Jamaican premier and prime minister from Norman Manley to Bruce Golding, with only one exception. That one exception resulted in a sidelining that had a blowback that set Jamaica back decades and that sealed his family's business's fate. This is a story of race, class, and power in postcolonial Jamaica. Through the lens of Mayer Matalon's life, the book outlines Jamaica's political and economic trajectory over the sixty years before and after independence. This biography peels back the surface layers of the many citations and public accolades, and goes beyond the often uninformed speculation on the Matalons' beginnings, revealing in rich detail the unusual life of an extraordinary Jamaican.