This work is a collection of selected papers presented at the conference "Trajectories of Freedom: Caribbean Societies, 1807-2007", a theme inspired by the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the British Empire. The papers interrogate and problematise shifting notions and expressions of "freedom" as they have evolved in Caribbean societies over the past two hundred years and as they have been applied in the context of the contemporary Caribbean.

Together, these essays illustrate the historical and continuing efforts in the various spheres of human endeavour in the Caribbean, including culture, education, language, social organisation, gender and politics - notwithstanding the constraints placed on Caribbean people by the legacies of slavery and colonialism - to finish the business of emancipation.