Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
Lecture 17: Migration
Migration has been one of the defining features of modern Caribbean history.
Initially, this involved the arrival of Europeans, Africans and, later, Asians – both free
and coerced. Later on, new patterns of migration developed between islands,
across the region and to distant states, including former the imperial metropoles.
Lecture structure
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Migration and Caribbean history
Post-emancipation migration
Migration in the ‘American Mediterranean’
Post-Second World War migration
Caribbean migrations: An overview
Migration and Caribbean history
The key to sustaining an enduring flow of sugar, cotton, and cocoa from the
Caribbean plantations to Europe in a preindustrial era, was, of course, the
importation of a labor force to replace the decimated aboriginal stock. The solution
came in the form of millions of African slaves who survived the Middle Passage and
who came to populate the Caribbean region. Perhaps nearly half of the roughly 10
million African slaves imported to the New World from Africa during the slave era
went to Spanish, British, French, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean colonies.
B. Richardson, ‘Caribbean migrations’, pp 205.
New patterns of migration
Caribbean migration in the early twentieth century had changed in at least two ways
from what it had been like in the decades immediately following emancipation. First,
the number of people moving about became much larger as U.S. capital investment
was concentrated in selected places, creating thousands of ephemeral work
opportunities for multi-skilled laborers and their families. Second, migration was no
longer simply a matter of traveling from one neighboring island to the next. Rather, it
often involved journeys to the far edges of the circum-Caribbean zone.
B. Richardson, ‘Caribbean migrations’, pp 212.
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