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West Indies
The West Indies since the 1790s
Emancipation
Toussaint Louverture
West Indian Creole societies were shaken by the successful slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, which led to a growing independence movement whose leaders included Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The movement resulted in Haiti’s independence in 1804, thus creating the first republic founded by people of primarily African descent in the Americas. In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British West Indies in two stages between 1834 and 1838. The French enacted emancipation in 1848 and the Dutch in 1863. But while these changes were taking place in the British, French, and Dutch West Indies, Spanish Cuba was developing as a slave-plantation producer of sugar. The importation of enslaved Africans into Cuba, despite a British naval blockade, turned the island into a predominantly Black and mixed-race society by the second half of the 19th century. Full emancipation was not enacted in Cuba until 1886, 13 years after it was accomplished in Puerto Rico, where tobacco was more important than sugar and where enslaved people made up less than 5 percent of the population. Subsequent free white immigration, especially for plantation work in the early 20th century, once again transformed Cuba into a mainly white society with a Hispanic culture.
Nineteenth-century emancipation created fewer changes than the slaveholders feared, largely because most of the best land was already part of plantations and because property-restricted franchises—especially in the British West Indies—favoured the established order. Nonetheless, the emancipated were free to sell their labour, migrate, squat, or purchase land. A “reconstituted” peasantry emerged in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Windward Islands. In the larger Leewards and Barbados the ex-slaves were unable to acquire land; mountainous (nonplantation) land on other islands was all that was available to formerly enslaved people, but the Leewards and Barbados lacked mountainous interiors. Thus, the nominally freed people there remained as plantation workers or emigrated and moved to Central America or the United States. Cuba’s emancipated Blacks were soon caught up in the war of independence with Spain; their descendants were later drawn into the burgeoning sugar industry developed by U.S. capital, much as mixed-race peasants had been in the Dominican Republic and as whites would be in Puerto Rico.
The persistence of the plantation system and of white elitism, bolstered by colonialism, shored up the structure of the grossly inegalitarian societies of the West Indies after emancipation. Colour-class and culture-class correlations persisted in a situation where—excepting the French West Indies from the late 19th century—democracy was systematically denied. The complexity of the social hierarchy of Blacks, whites, and people of mixed ethnicity was compounded on some islands by the arrival of other ethnic groups. Chinese indentured immigration to Cuba; South Asian indentured immigration to Trinidad and to a lesser extent to Jamaica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe; and free movement of Chinese, Portuguese, Syrians, and Lebanese to Trinidad and the Greater Antilles (mainly in the 20th century) produced minorities with the potential for social mobility. But, whereas the Portuguese, Syrians, and Lebanese (like the Jews before them) used trade to achieve mobility, the South Asians (Indo-Trinidadians) remained largely tied to rural enclaves, even in Trinidad, up to the 1960s. Since then, however, Indo-Trinidadians (about four-tenths of the population) have become urbanized and have entered government and commerce as well as a wide range of professional occupations.
Decolonization
Radical change in the social position of nonwhites has depended less upon emancipation than on decolonization. Having liberated themselves in 1804, the Haitians in the early 1820s invaded Santo Domingo and incorporated the former, almost forgotten Spanish colony into a Hispaniola-wide Haiti. In 1844, Dominicans rejected Haitian hegemony and declared their sovereignty. Later they reverted briefly to the Spanish crown, and they achieved their final independence in 1865. The third independence from a European power in the West Indies was Cuba’s, in 1898, and it involved not only two wars of independence with Spain but also U.S. intervention (the Spanish-American War). Cuba achieved formal independence from the United States in 1902 but remained a fief of its northern neighbour until the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934. By this time labour disturbances were about to break out throughout the region, a consequence of the Great Depression and the lack of means for democratic dissent; popular demands for development and decolonization were spreading from Jamaica to Trinidad.
Cayman Islands, West IndiesSeven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.
Most of the West Indian societies were decolonized with imperial consent after World War II—by a grant of full independence, as in the case of most of the British territories, or by incorporation into the mother country, as in French-affiliated islands of the Lesser Antilles, or through their association with the colonial power, as in the former Netherlands Antilles and some of the British territories. All these methods of decolonization have been endorsed by the United Nations. Nevertheless, Britain still retains several small West Indian overseas territories, most of which have shown little interest in independence: Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Puerto Rico continues to exist as a commonwealth of the United States, although its future political status remains the subject of debate among islanders; some groups continue to pursue statehood and others independence.
When World War II ended in 1945, only three West Indian states were independent—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba—and all either were or were about to become dictatorships. When the British, the French, and the Dutch began to decolonize, by either liberating or incorporating their territories, a major concern was the establishment of democracy. In pursuit of this objective the British tried to create an interisland federation that would incorporate more checks and balances than was feasible in a unitary state and that would also provide a vehicle for small-island decolonization. It was the failure of this policy with the breakup of the West Indies Federation (1958–62) that led to the first phase of independence (1962–66), the second stage of independence involving the Bahamas and the West Indies Associated States (1973–83), and the ultimate recognition by Britain of a residual and continuing category of dependencies.
Dependency
If most West Indian political units are no longer colonial, dependence remains the hallmark of Caribbean economies. For decades the terms of trade, for example, have operated against West Indian primary producers; none of the West Indian islands produces enough of any one major commodity to have a decisive role in fixing prices. More damaging in many cases than the terms of trade has been the penetration of each island economy by foreign enterprise. Neocolonialism prevails in most islands, and West Indians are acutely aware of their dependence on overseas capital, decision makers, and technologies, particularly in the French-affiliated islands of the Lesser Antilles.The importance of multinational corporations in West Indian economies is reflected in the preeminent position of North American companies in the Jamaican, Haitian, and Dominican Republican bauxite industries and (to a lesser extent by the early 21st century) in Trinidad’s petroleum economy; the role of British-based companies in West Indian sugar production and refining; and the monopolistic position of both British and North American companies in the marketing of bananas from Jamaica and the Windward Islands.
In the late 20th century there was substantial nationalization of foreign-owned enterprise in the West Indies because of pressure from governments and, in the Commonwealth Caribbean, as a result of the willingness of companies to surrender their least-viable operations and to use the compensation to open up activities elsewhere. For example, foreign-based sugar interests divested themselves first of land and then of factories in Jamaica and Trinidad, and Jamaicans and Trinidadians acquired interest in foreign banks.
It was once expected that decolonization would deliver more than halting development of dependent economies under generally conservative elites. When compared with the example of oppression and impoverishment in Haiti after 30 years of rule by François Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier and the severe political and economic instability that followed in their wake, however, the British, French, and Dutch former colonies can be said to have made considerable social and economic progress under generally democratic governments. Indeed, the process of democratization—one of the major goals of decolonization—is largely regarded to have moved successfully. However, governments remain unclear on how the benefits of self-determination can be extended into grassroots economic development and social change, although some countries, Jamaica in particular, have made considerable progress in breaking the real and psychological ties of dependency.
Colin Graham Clarke Bridget M. Brereton
Citation Information
Article Title: West Indies
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 16 April 2025
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/place/West-Indies-island-group-Atlantic-Ocean
Access Date: May 29, 2025