Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power, and in the Black Americas. By Caroline Shenaz Hossein. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 209pp. ISBN 9781442616240.The commentary on microfinance is polarized, with some viewing it as the solution to poverty, and others viewing it as a neo-liberal swindle that has become highly commercialized with usurious interest rates. It is therefore refreshing to find Caroline Shenaz Hossein's analysis of microfinance that offers a powerful critique but also sees some value in microfinance, offering a vision of how it is best accomplished.Hossein's book is set in the Caribbean region, particularly in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Grenada, and Guyana. She undertook painstaking research between 2007 to 2013, including field research plus hundreds of interviews that extended to Barbados, Panama, Canada, and the United States. No doubt, the book will be of interest to microfinance researchers and practitioners, students of the social economy and community development, to colonial and decolonizing historians, policymakers, and those interested in Caribbean socioeconomic affairs. Thoroughly researched and appropriately sub-divided into six chapters that move from the history and theory of microfinance and Black communities, to contextualizing the national case studies, to the intersection of culture and politics in microfinance, to the relations between borrowers and lenders, and finally to analyzing alternative and indigenous banking systems, Hossein's book is also an excellent resource for those teaching courses on the social economy, African studies, or Caribbean issues.In brief, Hossein's critique of what went wrong with microfinance in the Caribbean is grounded in a political analysis of the region. In that respect, her critique of microfinance differs from others in that most focus on the commercialization of microfinance (see, in particular, Dichter & Harper, 2008) or on its ineffectiveness in accomplishing its goals (for instance, Karim, 2011). Professor Hossein's critique, by comparison, focuses on how microfinance in the Caribbean has become a political tool or form of patronage. Although the analysis varies by nation, the gist of the critique-particularly in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago-is that microfinance has become a tool of a very divisive political system, the divisions often based on race but also nuanced by the additional intersections of class and gender.Rather than being a means to economic independence and greater prosperity, mainstream microfinance, as the book underscores, has become a tool of domination through which political elites extract loyalty from the poor and control them. As Hossein writes: Opposing administrations in Trinidad have used microfinance as a form of appeasement and patronage to their party's racial base (p. 87). This is not simply benign patronage. It is based on racial discrimination, depending on whether the party in power is predominantly of Afro or Indian origin. For example, Hossein points out that [s]ince the 1995 shift in political power to Indo-Trinidadians, poor AfroTrinidadians have been left in the slums without access to economic resources (p. 88). Similar racialized dynamics are true for Guyana. Moreover, violence can be used to obtain repayments: Violence was so ingrained in the origins of these countries that structural violence in society has permeated the microbanking arena (p. 93). In Jamaica, Hossein shows how some microfinance is controlled by gangsters or Dons, who loan at usurious rates and who can use violence if repayments are tardy. She refers to the Jamaican system of microfinance as Big Man, a form of patronage to the poor.The most heartening feature of Politicized Microfinance is that it is not simply a critique; the book also presents a vision about how the system can operate more effectively. In the book's acknowledgements, Hossein signals her intention by dedicating the book to her Guyanese grandfather who was a micro entrepreneur and her Grenadian grandmother who was a banker and who practised traditional or non-formal banking called susu, originating in Western Africa. …