The principal works in this collection are Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668); Aphra Behn's only tragedy, Abdelazer (1676), and her best-known work of prose fiction, Oroonoko (1688); and Thomas Southerne's dramatic adaptation of Oroonoko (1696). The Isle of Pines is about an Englishman, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with four women, one of whom is black; in the final version, printed here, his multitudinous descendants – by all four women – encounter some Dutch visitors. Abdelazer is the story of a captive Moorish prince who gains power and high office in the Spanish court and, after many villainies – including regicide and adultery with the Queen – is eventually outsmarted and destroyed. The two versions of Oroonoko tell of a nobler African prince, betrayed into a worse captivity – slavery in the British colony of Surinam – and destroyed by his attempts to gain liberty. The contextual material illustrates a range of attitudes toward slavery, colonialism, black Africans, and Native Americans from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. My aim has been to situate Neville, Behn, and Southerne in contexts that might have influenced them, rather than to see them as leading toward the late eighteenth century, when the mentality of imperialism was quite different and when the debate about slavery had assumed a character almost undreamed of in Behn's time.