ABSTRACT
The colonial society which the English yeoman farmers created on Nevis after 1628 was rather short-lived. Within a few decades, the small farmsteads based on family labor and servants supplemented by African slaves, gave way to large-scale sugar estates owned by a small group of planters who cultivated the land entirely with African slave labor. The family-based, patriarchal society was replaced by a plantocratic society, and the African slaves were delegated to a marginal position outside the social ranks of this order. The plantation society was to dominate the island society well into the nineteenth century, and it had a profound social, economic and cultural impact on the local society which is still felt today.
