ABSTRACT
From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean basin area was the arena in which most major and several minor European powers played out their imperial ambitions. Theories of empire – the role and value of colonies, the nature of wealth, and the dynamic of trade and investment – altered in the course of those centuries, ranging from statist mercantilist systems to a higher degree of free trade in the course of the nineteenth century. The nature of labour, patterns of settlement, and the relative importance of colonization by the metropolis evolved, with African slavery, which was predominant, indentured labour, and various forms of forced labour gradually giving way in the course of the nineteenth century to free labour systems and a higher degree of migration of peoples from the colonizing powers. Systems of governance also evolved, with a gradual movement away from centralized colonial rule involving little local participation to increased local autonomy and, in some instances, actual independence by the end of the nineteenth century, although most of the real independence was delayed well into the twentieth.
