ABSTRACT
The region’s islands (and mainland enclaves) have prospered and declined through a period of some 500 years of externally dominated incorporation into a succession of metropolitan empires and domains. Early on, there were European ‘encounters’, which consolidated patterns of commercial wealth in some islands, plantation colonialism and sugar cane prosperity in many others, even buccaneering and smuggling in others. Colonial regimes imported and imposed European class values and systems on island societies, with local creole cultures suppressed or subordinated to lower-class status. Slavery thoroughly changed the demographic profiles of island populations, turning them from white-dominated to Afro-Caribbean majorities (see Chapter 2). However, under colonialism European class stratification upheld a racial continuum in its societal hierarchy, the usual socio-political structure being a white-to-black class stratification (see Chapter 5). From top to bottom, came the powerful ‘white’ elites, then ‘brown’, mixed-race middle classes and the black powerless masses as the majority underclass. It would take over three centuries, eventual decolonisation and several decades of societal transformation thereafter before this rigid racial/class hierarchy would be challenged and modified to any appreciable degree (see Chapter 5).
