ABSTRACT
The West Indian movement was the pioneer movement as far as Britain was concerned. While conditions such as population pressure in the West Indies were important in conditioning the population towards emigrating, the dynamic control on the movement lay in Britain rather than the Caribbean. The dominant regulator of West Indian migration to Britain up to the time of the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act was the demand for labour in Britain. There are, at the time of writing, just over half a million people of Afro-Caribbean descent living in Great Britain. They constitute about one per cent of the total population and about a quarter of the black and brown population of Great Britain. The greater part of the movement from the West Indies took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was determined very largely by the demand for labour in Britain.
