Robertson examines how people in St. Lucia percieve emancipation. She argues that the circumstances of St. Lucia's colonial past made ideals of freedom pervasive and emancipation intensely complicated, with consequences that are felt in contemporary St. Lucian identity and in strongly African cultural foundations and continuities.;
Sheridan discusses some of the common endeavours he shared with Douglas Gordon Hawkins Hall concerning the West Indian Economic and Social History. Foremost among the historians of the transition from slavery to freedom in individual West Indian colonies is Douglas Hall, whose contributions to West Indian history and culture are manifold.;
Watson investigates the emigration of indigenous Amerindians in the West Indies during the period 1834-1900 and their replacement with enslaved Africans. After the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, the poor whites, who used to perform militia service on plantations in the West Indies, were forced to emigrate due to lack of employment opportunities.;
Internal, indentured and regional migration were tightly interlinked in post-emancipation Martinique by both contemporary perceptions and migrant actions. Anticipating a flight from the estates, colonial elites were committed before emancipation to constructing a replacement workforce through immigration. Indentureship was therefore a reaction to a crisis of labour relations rather than of labour supply. Such schemes also stimulated regional movements, from marronage by indentured Africans and Asians to recruitment efforts in the British West Indies. Viewed together, the three faces of post-emancipation migration reveal the continuing tension between the colony's search for coerced labour and the migrants' assertions of agency. [abstract];
