In this two-volume sequel to his book on the French Caribbean colonies (1842), Victor Schoelcher turns his attention to the rest of the Caribbean, looking at colonial plantation slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which he names "the past", preparations for emancipation in the Danish colonies: "the present", the results of abolition in the British colonies of Jamaica, Antigua and Dominica: "the beginning of the future", and freedom in Haiti: "the future realised!" (I, 3). He describes his work as a social study of the effects of emancipation upon the formerly enslaved and on the whole of Caribbean society. Schoelcher is critical of some aspects of how British emancipation was managed, but declares the date of the 1st August 1838 as the "greatest glory of the British people" (I, 11). He argues that where slavery still existed, emancipation must be imposed on planters, as they would never voluntarily make changes.