Michael Craton

The transition from slavery to free wage Labour in the Caribbean, 1780–1890: A survey with particular reference to recent scholarship

The study of the transition from slavery to wage labour and related transformations throughout the Caribbean sphere is greatly more complicated but potentially more rewarding than examining the single (if not simple) process at either end of the spectrum of plantation America in the United States and Brazil. More than a hundred years separates the first concentrated onslaughts of the secular and religious opponents of British slavery in the Caribbean in the early 1780s from the freeing of the last slaves in Cuba in 1886. Apart from including the immediate and indirect effects of the slave revolution in Haiti between 1791 and 1804, such a study should look at the sequential termination of slave trading between 1805 and 1860, and the subsequent revision and ending of slavery itself between 1834 and 1886 in five different imperial systems; the British, French, Danish, Dutch and Spanish. Moreover, it should not restrict itself, as many studies have done, to the slavery of large plantations (especially sugar plantations) where black slaves hugely outnumbered free coloureds and whites, but should also include non-plantation slavery, the areas where slavery co-existed with other forms of production and labour and slaves did not necessarily outnumber the free, and the many marginal areas where slavery legally existed but was not the primary mode. Yet this very complexity and prolongation allows us to consider what was unique and what common in each phase and area, what constituted a standard pattern, what was the result of cumulative internal developments, and what of changing external forces. Covering such a broad spectrum in the central arena of the plantation system also provides the best of opportunities to distinguish all the distinct and often counterposed ideologies that were involved: those of the planters, the imperialists, the philanthropists, the slaves and ex-slaves, and by no means least, the many historians who have described and analysed the process. Above all, the micro-study of slavery and its aftermath in each sub

The Bahamian self and the Haitian other: The migration of Haitians to and through the Bahamas, 1950–2000

This article briefly traces the history of Haitian migration to and from and through the Bahamas, going on to differentiate and describe the lifestyles of contemporary Haitian Bahamians, and to provide a description and analysis of the current crisis in Haitian‐Bahamian social relations. It shows that the minimal and largely temporary migrations when both areas were almost equally poor were succeeded by a flood in the 1960s, once Bahamian prosperity and labour shortages contrasted starkly with Haitian poverty, political turmoil, and overpopulation. For the last quarter century Haitians have comprised as much as a sixth of all those living in the Bahamas. The majority of migrants arrived illegally, but by the 1990s had been augmented by a rapidly increasing number of second and third generation residents. Many have already assimilated, but in general inter‐ethnic tensions have escalated since the 1970s, exacerbated by the downturn in the host economy, competition for jobs, increased militancy on the part o...