Migration and Exclusion: Caribbean Echoes and British Realities

Abstract

Slavery was a form of labour control based on forced migration. Its end marked the beginning of a period of economic transition, which in many parts of the Caribbean culminated in the rise of the corporate plantation and increasingly mechanised production. By 1920, the famous emigration to Panama and Cuba had occurred and Post gives a net emigration of 146,000 for the years 1880–1921 in a population which at the end of that period reached 858,100. Migration to Britain in the mid-twentieth century was a partial release from the pressures of new technology and new modes of production that had become increasingly evident after 1890. The racism generated by slavery, which was in essence relatively simple with its powerful correlation between colour and class, lasted well after the end of apprenticeship in the British Caribbean. Despite all the obvious differences, there are echoes too in the role that racism played in maintaining old migrant labour systems of labour control.