Chapter 5 assesses the nature and position of local elites in the four territories. In Cayman, economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of a small, mostly White elite group. In the French Antilles, though the descendants of White plantation-owning families controlled the economic sphere, local politics were dominated by a Black political elite who had emerged after abolition. Local intellectuals, like Aimé Césaire in Martinique, were key negotiators of decolonisation. Some have described the BVI as a ‘classless’ society. Certainly, the redistribution of land and the departure of the White plantation owners in the decades after abolition had led to a relatively equal population of smallholders. However, it is important to note that the first political group to champion Virgin Islander rights was established in the 1930s by a group of merchants and a lawyer, who had all become more economically successful through opportunities in the US and during the Prohibition era. Local elites, seeking to improve the islands, acting in their self-interest, or collaborating with colonial representatives, were key actors in the negotiation of the islands’ political status.