ABSTRACT
The establishment of colonial dispensations on the Caribbean frontier by rival European imperial powers was conceived and implemented within an ideological framework that sanctioned and mandated the extensive use of servile labour. The creation and survival of economic enterprises across imperial borders, in mining, agriculture, distributive trades and services, depended upon the availability of coerced unfree labour. Entrepreneurial thinking, likewise, was constrained by a set of specific economic references in which the attainment of growth and profitability, and a stable social order, were seen as contingent upon the supply and organization of unfree labour. 1
This colonial cosmology reflected centuries of cumulative experiences, but emerged specifically from an interpretation of the politics and psychology of conquest, the application of the principles of marginal economics in labour use under frontier conditions, and a pragmatic understanding of how to refashion old managerial concepts to social organization within the empire. It was clear to all with an interest in the colonial mission that by the seventeenth century the options as far as labour use was concerned were reduced to three basic forms. These choices were the reduction of the conquered indigenous population to servitude on lands appropriated from them, the transfer of surplus labour from the imperial centre to the colonial periphery under set contractual conditions, and the trading in chattel labour from the already well established African market. Also, these forms were considered discrete in the sense that their structures were clinically demarcated by racial differences-heightened by clearly distinct methods of recruitment.2
