230) Fiber reinforced plastic

Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP), also known as fiber reinforced polymer, is in fact a composite material constituting a polymer matrix blended with certain reinforcing materials, such as fibers. The fibers are generally basalt, carbon, glass or aramid; in certain cases asbestos, wood or paper can also be used.

The Formation of FRPs

Going back to the basics, there are two processes through which a polymer is developed: step-growth polymerization and addition polymerization. Composite plastics are formed when a couple of homogeneous materials possessing different characteristics bond together to produce a final product with the desired mechanical and material properties. These composite materials can be of two types, fiber reinforced and particle reinforced.

Fiber reinforced plastic is that category wherein the mechanical strength and elasticity of the plastics are enhanced through incorporation of fiber materials. The matrix, which is the core material devoid of fiber reinforcement, is hard but comparatively weaker, and must be toughened through the addition of powerful reinforcing fibers or filaments. It is the fiber which is critical in differentiating the parent polymer from the FRP.

Most of these plastics are formed through various molding processes wherein a mold or a tool is used to place the fiber pre-form, constituting dry fiber or fiber containing a specific proportion of resin. After ‘wetting’ dry fibers with resin, “curing” takes place, wherein the fibers and matrix assume the mold’s shape. In this stage, there is occasional application of heat and pressure. The different methods include compression molding, bladder molding, mandrel wrapping, autoclave, filament winding, and wet layup, amongst others. 

Common Properties of FRPs

These composite materials typically exhibit low weight and high strength.  They are so strong that the automotive industry is increasingly interested in using them to replace some of the metal in cars.  Fiber reinforced plastics can be as strong as some metals but they are much lighter and therefore more fuel efficient.

It is possible to customize the properties of fiber reinforced plastics to suit a wide range of requirements. Fiber reinforced polymers typically have impressive electrical and compression properties and display high grade environmental resistance. One important factor that makes these materials a favorite among different industrial sectors is the manufacturing process, which is quite cost-effective. The rate of productivity is medium to high and a ready bonding is exhibited with dissimilar materials.

The other exclusive properties of fiber reinforced plastics include commendable thermal insulation, structural integrity, and fire hardness along with UV radiation stability and resistance to chemicals and other corrosive materials.

The characteristics of fiber reinforced plastics are dependent upon certain factors like mechanical properties of the matrix and fiber, the relative volume of both these components, and the length of the fiber and orientation within the matrix.

Common Fibers include:

(i) Glass is a very good insulating material and, when blended with the matrix, forms fiberglass or glass reinforced plastic. Compared to carbon fiber, it is both less strong and rigid and less brittle and expensive.

(ii) Carbon based fiber reinforced plastics offer high tensile strength, chemical resistance, stiffness, and temperature tolerance along with low thermal expansion and weight.  The carbon atoms form crystals which lie mostly along the fiber’s long axis. This alignment makes the material strong by making the ratio of strength to volume high.

(iii) Aramid is a fiber component that results in robust and heat-resistant synthetic fibers. It finds wide applications in many industries.

Fiber reinforced plastics find wide applications in the automotive, aerospace, construction and marine sectors. Glass fiber reinforced plastics are a very good option for the power industry as they are devoid of any magnetic field and can offer considerable resistance to electric sparks. The uses are diversifying, a phenomenon evident in the entry of carbon fibers in sports goods, gliders, and fishing rods, along with Japan’s application of FRPs to hydraulic gates.

Hi,

#4252. A man spends 28% of his salary on food. From the remaining, he spent 1/6th on rent and sends 3/8th to his mother. If he is left with $5280, what amount he sends to his mother?

409) Samuel Hunter Christie

B. London, England, 22 March 1784; d. Twickenham, London, 24 January 1865),

Magnetism.

Christie was the only son of James Christie, founder of the well-known auction galleries, and his second wife, formerly Mrs. Urquhart. Samuel was educated at Walworth School, Surrey, and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered as a sizar in October 1800. He was active in athletics and was a brother officer with Lord Palmerston in the grenadier company of University Volunteers. In 1805 he took his bachelor’s degree as second wrangler and shared the Smith’s prize with Thomas Turton. Appointed third mathematical assistant in Woolwich Military Academy in July 1806, Christie became professor of mathematics there in June 1838. He made major revisions in the curriculum, raising it to a high standard.

Christie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 12 January 1826, frequently served on the Society’s council, and was its secretary from 1837 to 1854. He married twice and by his second wife, Margaret Malcom, was the father of the future Sir William H. M. Christie, astronomer royal from 1881 to 1922. Samuel H. Christie was a vice-president of the Royal Astronomical Society and one of the visitors of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Owing to ill health, he retired from his professorship in 1854 and moved to Lausanne.

Almost all of Christie’s investigations were related to terrestrial magnetism. In June 1821, while studying the influence of an unmagnetized iron plate on a compass, he discovered “that the simple rotation of the iron had a considerable influence on its magnetic properties.”  Although he delayed making a detailed announcement of his results until June 1825, Christie did refer to this discovery in June 1824. His work was independent of, and prior to, Arago’s report of the magnetic influence of rotating metals. From his experiments he concluded that since “the direction of magnetic polarity, which iron acquires by rotation about an axis… has always reference to the direction of the terrestrial magnetic forces,… this magnetism is communicated from the earth.” He then went on to speculate that the earth in turn receives its magnetism from the sun.

In other papers Christie reported on a method for separating the effects of temperature from observations of the diurnal variation of the earth’s magnetic field. In addition he speculated that this variation is caused by thermoelectric currents in the earth produced by the sun’s heating. Christie also observed a direct influence of the aurora on the dip and horizontal intensity of the earth’s magnetic field. As a recognized authority, Christie prepared a “Report on the State of Our Knowledge Respecting the Magnetism of the Earth” for the 1833 meeting of the British Association, reported on the magnetic observations made by naval officers during various polar voyages, and was the senior reporter on Alexander von Humboldt’s proposal that cooperating magnetic observatories be founded in British possessions.

Christie’s paper “Experimental Determination of the Laws of Magneto-electric Induction…” was the Bakerian lecture for 1833. In it Christie showed that “the conducting power, varies as the squares of [the wires’] diameters directly, and as their lengths inversely.” He also concluded that voltaelectricity, thermoelectricity, and magnetoelectricity are all conducted according to the same law, which lent further support to the theory that all these electricities are identical. In this paper Christie also gave the first description of the instrument that came to be known as the Wheatstone bridge.

228) Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

Introduction

A compact fluorescent light bulb is a device that creates light using about one fourth as much power as a conventional, incandescent light bulb for a given amount of light. Large amounts of electricity are used to power light bulbs in industrial countries. Because most electricity worldwide is generated by burning coal, which releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, especially in warmer climates, and have an impact on the amount of global climate change. CFLs contain small amounts of the toxic metal mercury and are more expensive than incandescent light bulbs. They last longer than incandescents and, averaged over the lifetime of the device, cost less to run.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

Conventional light bulbs operate on the principle of heating a small wire or filament until it glows brightly. Most of the energy consumed by an incandescent bulb is turned into heat, not light. Fluorescent light bulbs operate on the principle that certain gas mixtures, such as mercury vapor mixed with xenon or argon, emit ultra-violet radiation (a form of light invisible to the human eye) when excited by an electric current. A coating on the inside of a glass tube filled with such a gas can absorb the ultraviolet radiation and re-radiate it as visible light.

Incandescent bulbs convert about 90% of the electricity they consume into heat, whereas fluorescent light bulbs convert only about 30% into heat. The result is that a fluorescent bulb uses much less electricity to provide a given amount of light. Heat from light bulbs is often undesirable. In air-conditioned buildings, for example, electricity must be purchased to remove the heat produced by interior lighting, so owners pay twice, once to make the unwanted heat and once to remove it.

Scientists first noticed the production of electromagnetic radiation by electrified gases in the late nineteenth century. The invention of the commercial fluorescent light bulb is credited to German inventor Edmund Germer (1901–1987), who in 1926 patented a fluorescent bulb that used an inner bulb coating to convert ultraviolet light to relatively pleasing white light.

Fluorescent lights have traditionally been designed as long tubes, either straight or looping, because lower electric currents (which are easier to produce and safer for the consumer) are needed to produce a given amount of light from a longer tube. Small or “compact” fluorescent light bulbs that could be screwed into a conventional light socket would require either complex, maze-like glassware to pack long gas paths into small volumes or high currents that would waste power.

In the 1970s, a number of inventors sought solutions to these design barriers. Several designs that worked in the laboratory were produced, but no commercially viable design was put forward until the idea of bending a tube into a double-spiral shape was invented by Edward Hammer at the General Electric Corporation in 1976. Although it was more difficult and expensive to make such tubes than to make conventional bulbs, gradual improvements in technique made it possible for spiral-bulb compact fluorescents to be marketed starting in 1995.

Impacts and Issues

CFLs cost much more per unit than incandescent light bulbs, but last longer: about 7,500 hours versus only 1,000 for an incandescent bulb. Because they use less power, burden air conditioning less, and last longer, they end up costing less despite their higher up-front cost. A savings of $30 or more per bulb is cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when CFLs are used instead of traditional incandescent bulbs. Because most electricity is generated by burning coal and CFLs save electricity, CFLs tend to cause less carbon dioxide to be emitted, which helps mitigate global climate change.

Globally, electric lighting causes carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 70% of those from passenger vehicles. Thus, if every American home replaced just one incandescent bulb with a CFL, the carbon dioxide savings would be roughly equivalent to taking 800,000 cars off the road. Because of the cost and other advantages, some governments have considered, or have taken, action to speed the replacement of incandescent with fluorescent bulbs. In 2007, Australia became the first nation to announce that it would phase out incandescent bulbs entirely by 2012. Also in 2007, California was considering legislation that would ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs between 25 watts and 150 watts.

WORDS TO KNOW

GREENHOUSE GASES: Gases that cause Earth to retain more thermal energy by absorbing infrared light emitted by Earth's surface. The most important greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and various artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons. All but the latter are naturally occurring, but human activity over the last several centuries has significantly increased the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in Earth's atmosphere, causing global warming and global climate change.

ULTRAVIOLET: Light that vibrates or oscillates at a frequency of between 7.5 x {10}^{14} and 3 x {10}^{16} Hz (oscillations per second), more rapid than the highest-frequency color visible to the human eye, which is violet (hence the term “ultraviolet,” literally above-violet). Ultraviolet light is absorbed by ozone (O3) in Earth's stratosphere. This absorption serves both to shield the surface from this biologically harmful form of radiation and to heat the stratosphere, with important consequences for the global climate system.

WATT: Unit of power or rate of expenditure of energy. One watt equals 1 joule of energy per second. A 100-watt light bulb dissipates 100 joules of energy every second, i.e., uses 100 watts of power. Earth receives power from the sun at a rate of approximately 1.75 x {10}^{17} watts.

American consumers have been slow to adopt CFLs: only 2% to 5% of the 2 billion light bulbs sold in the United States each year are CFLs. Critics have pointed out that CFLs, like all fluorescent bulbs, contain the highly toxic metal mercury—about 5 milligrams (mg) per bulb. About 600 million fluorescent bulbs containing a total of 13,600 kg (30,000 lb) of mercury are thrown into U.S. landfills every year. However, because coal-burning also releases mercury and because CFLs prevent the burning of so much coal, an incandescent bulb causes the release, on average, of about 3.7 times more mercury per hour of lighting provided than does a CFL.

A more efficient, less toxic, and longer-lasting lighting technology—light-emitting diodes (LEDs)—is currently under development. LEDs remain relatively expensive, however, and are unlikely to displace CFLs in most applications in the near future.

Because of their mercury content, broken CFLs should not be touched with bare hands. They should also be recycled as toxic waste, not dumped in ordinary trash. Such dumping is illegal in California and several other U.S. states.

Hi,

#4251. Ram spends 50% of his annual income on household items, 20% of his income on buying clothes, 5% of his annual income on medicines and saves $11250. What is Ram's annual income?

408) Hans Berger

(B. Neuses bei Coburg, Germany, 21 May 1873; d. Jena, Germany, 1 June 1941)

Psychiatry, electroencephalography.

The son of Paul Friedrich Berger and of Anna Rückert, Berger graduated from the Gymnasium at Coburg and then entered the University of Jena in 1892. After one semester in astronomy he transferred to medicine. In 1897 he became assistant to Otto Binswanger at the university’s psychiatric clinic. He was appointed chief doctor in 1912 and director and professor of psychiatry in 1919; he retired in 1938. His associates described Berger as punctual, strict, demanding, and reserved.

The central theme in Berger’s work was the search for the correlation between objective activity of the brain and subjective psychic phenomena. In his work on blood circulation in the brain (1901) he described his efforts to gain insight into this correlation through plethysmographic registration of the brain pulsations. He investigated the influence of the heartbeat, respiration, vasomotor functions, and position of the head and body on brain pulsations, which were measured through an opening, made by trephination, in the skull. Berger also studied the effects of a number of medications—such as camphor, digitoxin, caffeine, cocaine, and morphine—on brain pulsations. The results of these investigations were disappointing, yet Berger continued his search for measurable expressions of psychic conditions through experiments on blood circulation (1904, 1907).

After 1907 Berger tried to discover a correlation between the temperature of the brain and psychic processes. He postulated that through dissimilation in the cortex, psychic energy (P-Energie) develops, along with heat, electrical energy, and neural energy. These experiments also came to a dead end, according to Berger’s publication of 1910. Nevertheless, in his lectures on psychophysiology, given from 1905 on and published in 1921, the problem of P-Energie Continued to hold his interest. His tenaciousness in this matter is apparent from a memo in his journal dated 14 December 1921, in which he says that the goal of his research continues to be the correlation between the expressions of the human mind and the processes of dissimilation the in brain.

After his disappointing experiments measuring the blood circulation and temperature of the brain, Berger (following his return from World War I) devoted himself mainly to the measurement of the brain’s electrical activity. In 1902 he had taken measurements of electrical activity above skull defects with the Lippmann capillary electrometer, and later with the Edelmann galvanometer. In 1910, however, Berger mentioned in his journal that the results of these measurements were not satisfactory. Therefore, until 1925 he followed two methods of research: stimulation of the motor cortex through a defect in the skull, measuring the time between stimulus and contralateral motor reaction, and registration of the spontaneous potential differences of the brain surface. After 1925 Berger no longer used the stimulation method. He specialized, with ever increasing skill, in registering the spontaneous fluctuations in electrical potential that could be recorded through the skull from the cortex. In his first publication on electro-encephalography (1929), he called 6 July 1924 the date of discovery of the human electroencephalogram. The EEG, the curves of the electrical potentials measured again and again between two points of the skull, did not give him a closer insight into the correlation between the electrical activity of the brain and psychic energy. However, electroencephalography has proved to be of ever increasing importance in diagnosing and treating neurological diseases (epilepsy, brain tumors, traumata).

Berger’s work was strongly influenced by the exact psychology of the nineteenth century. In developing his psychophysiology, Berger used the ideas of J. F. Herbart, R. H. Lotze, G. T. Fechner, W. Wundt, and the Danish psychologist A. Lehmann as a base. In the experimental field, Berger was in all aspects a follower of A. Mosso. Berger’s experiments on brain circulation and brain temperature were identical with Mosso’s, and his publications on these subjects bore the same titles as Mosso’s papers.

In developing electroencephalography, Berger was influenced by Caton and by Nemminski. Caton had measured electrical potentials on the exposed cortex of experimental animals in 1875, but he was not able to record these phenomena graphically. Nemminski recorded the first electrocerebrogram on dogs with the skull intact by means of the Einthoven string galvanometer in 1913.

Berger’s historical significance lies in his discovery of the electroencephalogram of man. Although he began publishing his many papers on electroencephalography in 1929, he did not receive international recognition until Adrian and Matthews drew attention to his work in 1934.

Hi,

#7117. Name the the most widely recognized national symbol of Canada.

#7118. Where is the 'Jodrell Bank Observatory'?

227) Distillation

Distillation, process used to separate the substances composing a mixture. It involves a change of state, as of liquid to gas, and subsequent condensation. The process was probably first used in the production of intoxicating beverages. Today, refined methods of distillation are used in many industries, including the alcohol and petroleum industries.

The Basic Distillation Process

A simple distillation apparatus consists essentially of three parts: a flask equipped with a thermometer and with an outlet tube from which the vapor is emitted; a condenser that consists of two tubes of different diameters placed one within the other and so arranged that the smaller (in which the vapor is condensed) is held in a stream of coolant in the larger; and a vessel in which the condensed vapor is collected. The mixture of substances is placed in the flask and heated. Ideally, the substance with the lowest boiling point vaporizes first, the temperature remaining constant until that substance has completely distilled. The vapor is led into the condenser where, on being cooled, it reverts to the liquid (condenses) and runs off into a receiving vessel. The product so obtained is known as the distillate. Those substances having a higher boiling point remain in the flask and constitute the residue.

Since a perfect separation is never effected, the distillate is often redistilled to increase its purity (hence the expression "double distilled" or "triple distilled"). Many alcoholic beverages are distilled, e.g., brandy, gin, whiskey, and various liqueurs. The apparatus used, called the still, is the same in principle as other distillation apparatus.

The Fractional Distillation Process

When the substance with the lowest boiling point has been removed, the temperature can be raised and the distillation process repeated with the substance having the next lowest boiling point. The process of obtaining portions (or fractions) in this way is one type of fractional distillation. A more efficient method of fractional distillation involves placing a vertical tube called a fractionating column between the flask and the condenser. The column is filled with many objects on which the vapor can repeatedly condense and reevaporate as it moves toward the top, effectively distilling the vapor many times. The less volatile substances in the vapor tend to run back down the column after they condense, concentrating themselves near the bottom. The more volatile ones tend to reevaporate and keep moving upward, concentrating themselves near the top. Because of this the column can be tapped at various levels to draw off different fractions. Fractional distillation is commonly used in refining petroleum, some of the fractions thus obtained being gasoline, benzene, kerosene, fuel oils, lubricating oils, and paraffin.

The Destructive Distillation Process

Another form of distillation involves heating out of free contact with air such substances as wood, coal, and oil shale and collecting separately the portions driven off; this is known as destructive distillation. Wood, for example, when treated in this way yields acetic acid, methyl or wood alcohol, charcoal, and a number of hydrocarbons. Coal yields coal gas, coal tar, ammonia, and coke. Ammonia is also obtained by the destructive distillation of oil shale.

Hi,

#4250. In a school, the number of boys and girls are in the ratio 4:7. If the number of boys are increased by 25% and the number of girls are increased by 15%. What will be the new ratio of the boys and girls?

Miracles owing to Giant strides in the twenty-first century Medical Science, Monox D. I-Fly! Happy to learn the surgery went well! Good wishes!

226) Caribbean

The Caribbean islands lie on the northern and eastern sides of the Caribbean Sea, stretching in an elongated S shape from the Bahamas and Cuba in the north and west to Trinidad in the south. The islands are divided into two main groups: the large islands of the Greater Antilles and the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. Strong historical connections with the islands mean that the mainland territories of Guyana and Belize are frequently categorized as part of the Caribbean.

The First Inhabitants

The Caribbean islands were probably first settled from the South American mainland. When Europeans arrived in the region there were three main groups of people living there. The Ciboney people were found in parts of Hispaniola and Cuba. The Arawak people occupied most of the Greater Antilles, while the Caribs lived throughout the Lesser Antilles. The Caribs were the latest to arrive in the region, migrating northward. As a result of this movement, the peoples of the Caribbean were experiencing change before the arrival of Europeans. However, the arrival of people from the Old World set in motion transformations on a previously unimaginable scale.

The Arrival Of Europeans

In 1492 the three ships of Christopher Columbus's Spanish expedition made landfall in the Bahamas, before heading south to Cuba and Hispaniola. Columbus famously thought that he had reached the East Indies and clung to this belief until his death in 1506. On his second voyage to the New World, Columbus brought seventeen ships, over a thousand soldiers, and European plants, horses, and livestock. This expedition explored and named many of the Caribbean islands, landing on Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.

The first Spanish settlements were in the Greater Antilles, the largest being on Hispaniola. The principal aim of Spanish colonization was to find and extract silver and gold, and Spanish settlers established mines as well as breeding horses and livestock. By the early sixteenth century, large deposits of gold and silver had been discovered in the mainland areas of Mexico and Peru. Thereafter, Spanish Caribbean settlements operated as staging posts and recruitment areas for expeditions to these regions.

The Spanish sought to convert the original inhabitants of the region to Christianity, but these efforts met with little success, and relations between the two groups were generally violent and exploitative. The Spaniards conquered the islands by force and gave no quarter when faced with resistance. They coerced native people into working in the mines, and disturbed local patterns of food production, causing many to starve. Furthermore, natives of the islands lacked immunities to European diseases. It is unclear exactly what proportion of them died as a result of illnesses imported from the Old World, but the arrival of Europeans in the region was certainly a social and demographic disaster, and native people were either destroyed or integrated into the Spanish society. The vast majority were wiped out within a few generations, certainly on the larger islands.

The End Of Spanish Hegemony

Prior to the end of the sixteenth century, Spain was the only colonial power in the Caribbean. However, Spain's power and influence was declining in Europe and it was increasingly difficult to exclude the English, Dutch, and French from the Caribbean. Initially, the only challenge to Spanish hegemony came from the increasingly common raids on ships and ports by pirates, such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, who came in search of Spanish gold and silver. Buccaneers (raiders operating from bases in the Caribbean) continued to harass and plunder ships and ports in the region until the eighteenth century.

By the seventeenth century the period of Spanish hegemony was over, and the English, French, and Dutch began to trade and form colonies in the Caribbean. European powers fought to expand their empires and gain dominance of the sea, and because the financial value of Caribbean products and trade was high, competition between the main powers was particularly fierce in the region. The Caribbean became a focal point in the increasingly globalized conflicts between Britain and France during the eighteenth century. At times of war, sea battles were fought and islands were captured and recaptured. Between 1762 and 1814 control of the island of St. Lucia alternated between Britain and France seven times.

Sugar And Slavery

The expansion of sugar production and slavery helped to ensure that Caribbean colonies were economically and strategically vital to European governments. During the seventeenth century, having experimented with other crops, notably tobacco, northern European settlers began planting sugar, which grew well in tropical conditions and fetched a high price in Europe. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the wealthiest English plantation colony was Barbados, which was then superseded by the larger island of Jamaica, conquered from the Spanish in 1655. The most lucrative sugar colony in the Caribbean was French Saint-Domingue, in the western third of Hispaniola.

Effective sugar production required large holdings of land. This resulted in the creation of plantations that often covered thousands of acres. The cultivation and processing of this crop was also extremely labor-intensive, and, having experimented with indigenous slaves and indentured European labor, Caribbean planters turned to African slaves to meet their labor needs. Slaves imported from the west coast of Africa proved hardier than the indigenous islanders and a more reliable source of labor than European workers. Existing slaving networks in Africa ensured that there was a steady supply of slaves to meet European demand, and because they were treated as items of personal property, enslaved people could be easily bought and sold. The transatlantic slave trade therefore solved the planters' labor problems and permanently altered all aspects of life in the Caribbean colonies. Over five million Africans arrived in the Caribbean, having endured the horrors of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic.

Sugar plantations and the institution of slavery expanded together and had reached the height of their growth and profitability by the end of the eighteenth century. The precise demographic structure of slave societies differed from place to place, but everywhere in the Caribbean they were characterized by large black majorities, as slaves came to heavily outnumber the white inhabitants of the islands. For example, in 1800 there were about twenty slaves to every white person on the island of Jamaica. Across the region, a class of free colored people also emerged, occupying a social and legal position in between the islands' enslaved majorities and privileged white minorities.

Several factors discouraged whites from permanently settling in the region. A plethora of highly contagious diseases and the threat of slave uprisings rendered life in the Caribbean uncomfortable and dangerous. Many larger proprietors lived in Europe as absentees, and those whites who remained in the region did not consider the islands to be a permanent home and maintained a close affinity with the colonial metropole. Caribbean slaveholders also relied upon European military support to control their slaves. Such ties of dependency helped to ensure that Caribbean colonists did not follow their mainland Spanish and North American counterparts in demanding independence from European colonial systems.

In all colonies, slaves were worked hard and faced harsh treatment. In spite of this, enslaved people across the region created viable cultures that allowed them to resist the effects of slavery. Afro-Caribbean cultures emerged that reconfigured African beliefs, practices, and traditions in a New World setting. These cultures often merged with European traditions, especially because many slaves were converted to Christianity and most were forced to learn the language of their masters.

Resistance to slavery was a constant feature of life in the colonies. This ranged from day-to-day forms of resistance, such as working slowly, all the way to large-scale rebellions. Many slaves attempted to run away, and on larger islands, such as Jamaica and Hispaniola, some formed semiautonomous "Maroon" communities. While slave rebellions were common in the Caribbean, most ended in failure. In Saint-Domingue, however, unrest caused by the French Revolution resulted in a successful slave uprising—led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave—which culminated in the creation of the independent state of Haiti in 1804.

The Ending Of Caribbean Slavery

In 1807 the British abolished the transatlantic slave trade after a popular campaign led mainly by wealthy evangelicals. This came at a time when slave-produced sugar was still profitable. In the British Caribbean, an economic slump followed the ending of the trade, partly as a result of the demographic impact of abolition. In the British Caribbean, slaves eventually gained emancipation in 1838 as the result of continued pressure in Britain and ongoing slave resistance in the Caribbean. In the remaining French territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe, slavery ended in 1848, while slaves in the Dutch Caribbean were freed in 1863.

The abolition of slavery did not end the tensions that characterized societies long based on racialized social and economic divisions. Emancipated slaves sought independence from the sugar estates. Former slaveholders used a range of tactics to try to retain the freed people's labor, limit their access to land, and prevent their involvement in political life, causing tensions that resulted in protests and riots in British Caribbean territories throughout the postemancipation period. Some planters, especially those in Trinidad and Guyana, responded to their labor problems by importing South and East Asian indentured workers. Many of these laborers settled permanently, contributing to the social and cultural composition of those colonies.

Even as the sugar industry in the British and French Caribbean declined during the nineteenth century, Cuban production rose rapidly. Abundant fertile land, the removal of Spanish trade restrictions, and technological advances meant that the island experienced an economic boom that lasted until the late nineteenth century. Black slaves were used on Cuban plantations along with free workers from Europe, Asia, and Mexico, making the social structure and labor relations in the colony distinct from those in the British and French islands. Slavery survived in Cuba until the 1880s, when the institution was gradually phased out before a complete abolition in 1886.