Introduction

The writing of Caribbean social history is coming under fresh review by professional historians. The works of Adamson and Rodney are easily the most professional and scholarly that have been written on post-emancipation Guyana, but there are other modern publications of some importance to the social history of that period. Most of the recent professional social histories of 19th Century Guyana are in the form of unpublished Ph.D. dissertations and theses. There is also the fact that many historians find the terminology and theories of the social sciences highly “specialized” and not easily grasped by the “outsider”. Many social science theories that ought to be applied to social history are thus studiously eschewed by some historians. The theoretical debate thus lives on, and is as vibrant as ever. While this work is not sufficiently ambitious to pretend to resolve the differences, it does hope to make an important contribution to that debate.