ABSTRACT
JAMAICA’S WIDESPREAD social and economic decline and the collapse of the local sugar industry had required outside intervention. In response to planters’ complaints that the ex-slaves had simply quit the plantations, the British Parliament-so recently the instigator of slave emancipation-was persuaded to authorise the recruitment of Asian (mainly Indian) indentured labour for work in the Caribbean. The migrations began in 1845. When they ended in 1917 some 34, 412 Indians had been shipped to Jamaica (especially to the sugar estates in the parishes of St Thomas, St Mary, Clarendon and Westmoreland). Many more had gone to Trinidad and Guyana.1
