ABSTRACT
The abolition of slavery effected the colonies of the British Caribbean in widely differing ways. As early as 1838, John Gladstone, the father of William Ewart and one of the larger slave and estate owners in British Guiana, had decided that the sugar plantations would have to be made 'independent of our negro populatio'. Between 1834 and 1848 the planters brought some 46, 514 immigrants to British Guiana from India, Madeira, the West Indies and Africa. Ironically, the planters used these conditions to press not merely for more immigrants, but for immigrants bound by indenture. The indentured immigrants might properly be called a community almost entirely surrounded by legislation. Ignorance was also an essential element in maintaining the immigrants in a hermetic condition. In 1904, the Executive Council decided to disallow free passage to immigrants who had returned to India, and to forbid their reindenture if they did return.
