The unrest of the late 1930s was the outcome of profound crises which had accumulated over many decades. Economic dependency and the exploitation of labour had done their inexorable work. In the eighteenth century the Jamaican plantocracy reaped the economic rewards. ‘King Sugar’ reigned supreme. But after Abolition in the 1830s West Indian sugar was increasingly replaced by reliance on the cheaper sugar beet. The British government paid the planters compensation for the loss of ‘their’ property – that is, the enslaved: a bounty for their acceptance of the end of slavery. The planters looked elsewhere for more profitable investment. Jamaica became an economic backwater. The development of the US-owned banana industry did something to revive its fortunes, but left the majority of the working population untouched. By the Depression of the 1930s, the living standards of the masses had collapsed and unemployment was rife. These devastating consequences erupted politically, driven by intensified trade-union activity and by general, deep-seated social discontent – conditions which formed the historical background to the labour rebellions of 1938.