ABSTRACT
The French Caribbean territories - the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, with Guyane (French Guyana) on the South American mainland - share a number of common features. Like Hai'ti, they are old colonies of French settlement dating back to the early seventeenth century. They began as plantation societies, uneasily divided between a dominant white minority and the mass of uprooted Africans who worked the spice and sugar estates as slaves. After the abolition of slavery in 1848, substitute labourers, including immigrants from India and China, traders from the Middle East and, from the mid-twentieth century, migrants from poorer parts of the Caribbean basin all added to the ethnic mix. In contrast to their independent neighbours, these territories - some 1,300 miles southeast of Florida - voted in 1946 to become overseas departements of France, and as such have benefited from an artificially high standard of living as well as from French citizenship.
