ABSTRACT

The authors' interest in the comparative study of race and culture contacts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions is predominantly an interest in the comparison of race relations in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin subregions of the Caribbean region. Sociologically speaking, the Caribbean region may be said to extend as far as dense rural settlement of former African slaves is found; and the settlement of Africans, again, coincides with the lowland area of plantation economy. The Negro has become the leading phenomenon of the Caribbean region as the olive tree has always been the leading phenomenon of the Mediterranean region. English colonization must be understood by way of contrast. Englishmen are different. Racialist attitudes and abstentionist policies have widened the rifts and gaps that are inherent in plantation economy, irrespective of whether it operates with bond-slaves or wage-slaves or, for that matter, with share-tenants.