So in places like British Guiana and Jamaica where undeveloped land was readily available, the opportunity for former slaves to act autonomously was considerably better than, for example, on Barbados and Antigua where slaves were numerous and where plantation agriculture dominated a small geographic space.
The degree of economic success on the part of the post-emancipation plantation owners, he said, depended to a great extent on the ratio of labor to available land. Merivale, in a series of lectures on Caribbean political economy, presented an analysis of British colonial economies as they entered the period of adjustment after the Abolition Act of 1833 decreed liberty for slaves. With respect to the colonies of Britain, the "Merivale Paradigm" held the attention of scholars for generations as they assumed the validity of Herman Merivale's 1840s analysis. Only in recent decades have Caribbean scholars displayed sustained interest in the degree to which former slaves were able to establish viable economic alternatives following the demise of plantation slavery. His analysis contributes to a continuing inquiry into the nature of Caribbean colonial societies as they moved from slavery into post-emancipation environments where the supply of labor became uncertain. Howard Johnson, in The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933, assembles a collection of insightful essays which he arranges, archipelago-like, to display various aspects of continuous oligarchic control over Bahamian workers. Reviewed by Bruce Taylor (Department of History, University of Dayton) Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. The Bahamas From Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933.
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