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Immigration into the Caribbean; The Introduction of Chinese and East Indian Indentured Labourers Between 1839 and 1917
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
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It seems no exaggeration to say that the Caribbean used to ‘eat’ people. The autochthonous inhabitants of the region, the Amerindians, estimated to have numbered about one million before Columbus, quickly embarked on a course of rapid demographic decline after the intrusion of the Europeans. Around 1700 all Amerindians had virtually disappeared from the islands and only a fraction of them remained in the hinterland of the Guianas.
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1 Watts, David, The West Indies, Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge 1987) 73–74, 93, 101, 122 and 126:Google ScholarKnight, Franklin W,The Caribbean; the Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford 1978) 3–22Google Scholar.
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3 These figures are taken from Knight, Caribbean, 238–239 (table 4). Added to the number of whites are half the number of mulattoes. In comparing the immigration figures and the population figures of the Europeans and their descendants in the Caribbean it should be noted that there existed a return migration to Europe. Its scale, however, is not known. For this reason a comparison between these figures and similar statistics concerning the African population in the Caribbean is flawed, since Africans hardly left the region.
4 Figures on slave immigration between 1500 and 1870 from Rawley, James A., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; A History (New York 1981) 54 and 428. Figures on the black presence in the Caribbean around 1820 in Knight, Caribbean, 238–239) (table 4). Added to the number of blacks are half the number of mulattoesGoogle Scholar.
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48 Scott, Rebecca J., Slave Emancipation in Cuba; The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton 1985) 32, 98.Google ScholarAnkum-Houwink, J., ‘Chinese Contract Migrants in Surinam between 1853 and 1870’, Boletin de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 17 (1974) 47Google Scholar.
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68 Curaçao (1969) Jamaica (elections of 1980) and Grenada (1983). See also large-scale violence in Cuba after the Second World War, where Asian immigrants had virtually no lasting impact, as well as in Haïti, which received no Asians at all. All these examples indicate that there exists no simple relationship between the ethnic of diversity immigration into the Caribbean and political violence.
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