ABSTRACT
A legacy is also an inheritance. It necessarily requires both a giver and a receiver; and it may be welcome or unwelcome, sought or imposed, according to context. These considerations should not be forgotten in any survey such as the one being undertaken here, which seeks to relate a given phenomenon in the past, chattel slavery, with its consequences in the present. More so when that past seems somewhat remote in time and so much appears to have transpired in the meantime to lend it distance. And yet, appearances are not essences and much contemporary Caribbean social science has emphatically confirmed the past within the present, even to the point of suggesting that in reality very little has changed at all. Three examples can suffice.
