Following their indentureship, Africans continued to exercise economic and cultural autonomy by migrating to Trinidad for higher wages - establishing relationships with the larger Yoruba community there and impacting the local development of African work. Liberated Africans in Grenada also practised African- derived traditions and organised themselves in ethnically defined communities. Chapter 6 maintains that rather than assimilating into the African Grenadian population and losing their separate histories and identities, liberated Africans remained a distinctive category from the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, in part because of their post-indenture experiences. In their resolve to resist labouring on plantations, recaptured Africans formed independent communities, pursued independent economic activities, migrated to Trinidad for higher wages, and recreated and practised African cultures. Their strategic decisions, along with sugar's decline after 1834, ultimately led to the failure of the African immigration scheme and laid the conditions for the establishment of African work.

By examining Batman’s Treaty of 1835 we can put to rest the myth that British players never seriously considered treating with Aboriginal people for land, and that the treatment of sovereignty and rights of property in land in Britain’s Australian and New Zealand colonies was like chalk and cheese. The Port Phillip Association acted in the same manner as many similar groups in the British empire, making an agreement with native people to purchase their land and physically taking possession of territory in the hope that they might thereby be able to force government to concede its claim. But by the mid-1830s, the British Crown had been granting land to settlers for nearly fifty years as though it was the only source of title. This is what some historians would call ‘path dependency’. Moreover, there were no settlers who had no interest in any claim that Aboriginal people were the real owners of the land, and in the eyes of the government the Aboriginal people lacked the military power that would be needed to help bring into being, let alone uphold, a property regime that recognised native rights in land. Consequently, the native title was quickly unmade.