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This book is a study in the depth of a colonial 'plantation' during fifty critical years of slavery in the Caribbean. As the title suggests however, it is not concerned with slavery exclusively, but with a social entity of which slavery was a significant part. Brathwaite argues that the people - from Britain and West Africa, mainly - who settled, lived and worked in Jamaica, contributed to the formation of a society which developed its own distinctive character - creole society. This society developed institutions, customs and attitudes which were basically the result of the interaction between its two main elements, the African and European. But this creole society was also part of a wider American or New World culture complex, and as such, it was also shaped by the pressures upon it of British and European mercantilism, and the American, French, and Humanitarian Revolutions.