African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
362 p, Contents: Sugar production and British Caribbean dependence on external markets, 1769-1776 -- The American war and the British Caribbean economy -- British policy, Canadian preference, and the West Indian economy, 1783-1810 -- The sugar market after 1775 -- Debt, decline, and the sugar industry, 1775-1810 -- New management techniques and planter reforms -- Hired slave labour -- British Caribbean slavery and abolition -- The sugar industry and eighteenth-century revolutions -- War, trade, and planter survival, 1793-1810 -- Profitability and decline: issues and concepts, an epilogue
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];
