ABSTRACT
Tropical islands in the Caribbean were attractive investment sites for the growing capital being accumulated from commerce and industry in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The subsequent incorporation of reserve labor from Jamaica into a global labor market and the crystallization of labor export as a specialization of the Jamaican social formation within the world economy ensued. Legislation and trade restrictions proposed by various states as they struggled to secure optimal conditions for the advancement of their own enterprises, the fluctuations of global trade and production, and the economic trends that they engendered all contributed to the formation of a peripatetic labor force in the Caribbean. The first five movements of labor recruitment and migration out of Jamaica stretched over nearly a century. Cross-national movement of Jamaican laborers coalesced between 1850 and 1881, reached a peak by 1911– 1914, and began to ebb and return by 1921–1929.
