ABSTRACT
In the postwar era, the British and French Caribbean colonies presented similar economic conditions featuring the juxtaposition of plantation and peasant agriculture. In many of the islands, sugar production was in severe decline, the legacy of more than two centuries of overcultivation of limited land areas and competition from new, larger, sugar producers. Some Caribbean plantations had been subdivided and sold off to the state or to those ex-or part-time plantation labourers who sought land for subsistence or market farming. The decline of the sugar industry, which had come to symbolise economic prosperity in the British and French Caribbean colonies, spawned economic uncertainty, which was intensifi ed by the global economic depression of the 1930s. This poor economic outlook coincided with a demographic crisis in most of the Caribbean islands where ‘overpopulation’ was the result of the colonial emphasis on producing a labour force for the sugar industry. At the level of the household, the family, the community, and the colony, labour migration was incorporated into complex survival systems. As strategies for the socioeconomic advancement of households, labour emigration vied with the education of household members. Unlike migration for education, however, labour migration yielded tangible rewards relatively quickly.
