What was jamaica like in the 1930s

One was a young indentured laborer from Wales named Henry Morgan. He would prosper and rise to Lieutenant Governor. A visit to the naval base and the museum there, followed by a fresh seafood meal at an outdoor seaside restaurant, makes for a memorable cultural outing. When the English arrived, the Spaniards fled to the neighboring islands. Their slaves escaped into the mountains and formed their own independent groups, called Maroons.

The Maroons were in time joined by other slaves who escaped from the English. For a long time, they fought against the English who sought to re-enslave them.

So successful were the Maroons, fighting from their fortresses, that the English were forced to sign peace treaties granting the Maroons self-government and ceding to them the mountain lands that they inhabited. The runaways periodically staged rebellions until the treaty in that gave them a measure of local autonomy that they still retain today.

Every year on January 6, the Maroons celebrate the signing of this treaty and visitors are welcomed to partake in the lively song and dance within the sacred lands. This crucial turning point in the history of the region provided a transitional phase between the older Caribbean societies dominated by a few and a more open and modern era based on universal adult suffrage.

The decade also had some obviously memorable boundaries in the Great Depression which began starkly in the Caribbean in the s and ended — or at least changed direction sharply — with the Second World War which started in Most of the world, too, experienced a decade of transcendental importance, especially among the great majority of nations in the Atlantic community.

The principal political and economic factors that shaped the western world as well as the Caribbean during that turbulent decade were closely intertwined. Both the wider world and the Caribbean region experienced severe disruptions during the Great Depression.

For both, the adjustments to an unprecedented combination of depression and war would be painful and protracted. Yet the principal forces that created the distinctiveness of that important decade were not confined narrowly within a ten-year framework. Forces of serious change manifested themselves long before - in some cases as early as the eighteenth century - and lasted well beyond There had been ongoing conflict between the Maroons and colonists, which was resolved by Trelawny by granting the Maroons parcels of land, exempting them from taxes and allowing them to govern themselves.

Slave trade between Africa and Jamaica was finally abolished in and no additional slaves were to be brought to the island after March 1, Historically, much of Jamaica's success was based on the work of slaves, which led to a great deal of conflict. The Emancipation Act of moved slaves to an apprentice system that was intended to be a shift in the right direction, although it was rife with problems.

Slavery was officially abolished in , at which time many former slaves of African descent scattered to other parts of Jamaica, leaving plantation owners in need of workers; many of those owners turned to China and India as a source of labor. In the s, two figures, who have since been named National Heroes, began to make waves in Jamaica—Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante.