Abstract
Within the context of nineteenth century imperial relations, the maintenance of economic power by white creole elites in Barbados and Martinique can be regarded as unique cases of survival. They can be viewed as 'deviant cases' to the more general historical process which took place in all the other sugar islands of the Caribbean at the same period, in which the sugar industry passed out of the hands of an independent local planter class to a number of metropolitan-based British, French and American mercantile houses. This study represents an attempt to construct a causal explanation for these two cases of survival, in terms of a consciously evolved set of strategies to maintain established sources of economic, social and political power. The Weberian trichotomous model of class, status and power has been employed to construct the three main independent variables in this study, and a comparison' between the Barbadian and Martiniquan cases is effected in terms of these variables. From a temporal perspective the focus is diachronic: the emphasis being on changes in the elites' organization, structure and power from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present. By employing an historical perspective, I have sought to depict elite strategies of power maintenance as necessary responses to crisis and change, during a period which witnessed the 'fall' of indigenous planter elites elsewhere.