The Establishment of Immigrant Society in the Cayman Islands: Its Meaning and Implications

Part 3:

I continue my summary of Deconstructing Development: Immigration, Society and Economy in Early 21st Century Cayman, Bodden’s most recent publication. This second chapter forms part of a substantial volume comprising sixteen chapters and 307 pages, reflecting the breadth and depth of the project.

In this work, Bodden draws upon decades of scholarship, policy engagement, and sustained observation of his country’s social, economic, and cultural evolution. He writes not as a distant commentator, but as an insider – what I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘participant historian’ someone who has witnessed and experienced many of the transformations he analyses. This vantage point lends his work a particular authority. At the same time, he does not lapse into uncritical familiarity. Instead, he demonstrates reflexivity, periodically situating Cayman’s trajectory within comparative contexts and critically engaging the issues. This balance between insider knowledge and analytical distance strengthens the credibility and significance of his contribution. Nonetheless, the careful reader must engage the project with strong doses of suspicion and scepticism ready to learn but even more so ready to interrogate and to ask questions. In my estimation, this is Bodden’s best work and merits serious engagement from policymakers, scholars, and citizens alike.

This chapter argues that Caymanian society is fundamentally an immigrant society, composed entirely of imported populations. There is no historical or anthropological evidence of permanent Amerindian settlement in the Cayman Islands. As such, the author rejects the term “indigenous Caymanians” as historically inaccurate. Instead, he favours a distinction between Established Caymanians, that is descendants of early settlers who arrived before 1750 and later economic migrants who arrived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Established Caymanians are defined by their multigenerational lineage, inherited property rights, and uncontested ownership of ancestral lands, often obtained through long periods of unchallenged occupation. These historically accumulated rights distinguish them from more recent immigrants.

Early Migration and Settlement

The first significant wave of migration occurred between 1750–1800, during which many families whose surnames remain common today—such as Bodden, Ebanks, Rivers, Eden, Dixon, McLaughlin, Tatum, Parsons, McField, Seymour, Conolly, and Foster and others, settled on the islands. A second wave of settlers arrived between 1854–1910, including individuals such as Alexander McKeith Crighton, James Arch, F.S. McTaggart, J.C. Panton, John Miller, and Peter Henderson among others.

By the nineteenth century, Grand Cayman had developed into a modest but established settlement colony, with over 1,100 houses and evidence of increasing prosperity. This prosperity attracted expatriates seeking economic opportunity.

The First Expatriates

The abolition of slavery in 1835 marked a pivotal transformation in Caymanian society. In the post-emancipation period, racial divisions intensified rather than diminished. White colonial authority attempted to reassert dominance over newly freed Black populations, leading to adversarial relations. The local militia, composed largely of near-White Caymanians, many of whom were former slave owners lost neutrality. British authorities deployed a detachment of the West India Regiment to maintain order, but racial tensions remained high.

Into this volatile environment arrived two expatriates: Richard Phelan and Nathaniel Glover. Bodden refers to them as the first expatriates and explains that their experiences illustrate the privileged status afforded to White foreigners in Caymanian society.

Richard Phelan

Richard Phelan, an Irish immigrant from Knock, arrived in Grand Cayman in the early nineteenth century. Beginning as a humble hawker of thatch goods, he rose rapidly through diligence and business acumen. By 1839, he had been appointed a Justice of the Peace. He expanded into farming, shipping, turtling, and wrecking, accumulating significant wealth. His social standing increased further through marriage into a prominent Bodden Town family.

Despite his success story, often framed as a model of industrious expatriate achievement, Phelan reportedly displayed hostility toward Black residents and Black soldiers stationed on the island after emancipation. He was among those accused of levelling false charges against Black members of the West India Regiment. His legacy thus embodies both economic success and racial antagonism.

Nathaniel Glover

Nathaniel Glover, a slave owner from Boston, migrated to Grand Cayman in 1831. He married a prominent widow and was appointed Justice of the Peace in 1839, though his appointment was later revoked because he was not a natural-born British subject. Unlike Phelan, Glover did not accumulate significant wealth or achieve lasting prominence. However, he shared Phelan’s racist disposition and hostility toward Black residents. Both men benefited socially from their White foreignness, which facilitated upward mobility in ways that were largely inaccessible to non-White Caymanians.

Continuities into the Modern Era

In this chapter, Bodden draws a strong line of continuity between nineteenth-century expatriates and modern wealthy foreign investors. He argues that White expatriates historically received preferential treatment in business and governance, a dynamic that continues in contemporary Caymanian society. He suggests that modern expatriates often maintain racial hierarchies, monopolize commercial ventures, enclose land in gated communities, and marginalize established Black Caymanians.

Bodden presents land ownership as the central axis of inequality. As land becomes commodified and scarce, especially from the 1970s onward, foreign workers seeking permanent residency increasingly purchased property to strengthen their claims to belonging. This commodification of land intensified social stratification and reshaped Caymanian society. The author concludes that the “alien question” in Cayman cannot be resolved solely through politics or economics, but through deeper engagement with the forces of globalisation and colonialism.

This is one of the shortest chapters in this book- only three pages. However, it presents a forceful reinterpretation of Caymanian history centred on three major themes: migration, race, and land. The rejection of the term “indigenous Caymanians” is foundational and historically correct, even though it is still sometimes used in local conversations, obviously incorrectly.

Bodden emphasizes that all Caymanians descend from migrants, thereby rejecting any simple claim to indigeneity. Yet, almost immediately after dismantling the category of “indigenous Caymanians,” he introduces a new distinction — “Established Caymanians.” While framed differently, this move effectively reconstructs a hierarchy, not based on indigeneity, but on depth of settlement and inherited property rights. In doing so, the analysis reflects a broader and well-documented pattern within immigration studies: early settler or “first arriver” populations often distinguish themselves from later arrivals to preserve social status, political legitimacy, or economic advantage.

As Fredrik Barth (1969) demonstrated in his seminal work on ethnic boundary formation, group identity is maintained not only through shared origins but through the active construction and policing of social boundaries. Later migration scholars such as Castles and Miller (2009) similarly observe that layered migration histories frequently generate internal hierarchies within settler societies. Seen in this light, the emergence of such a distinction is not anomalous but consistent with comparative research on migration and nation-building.

My own view is that this tendency toward boundary demarcation is, in many respects, understandable. Early arrivals would have established the foundational cultural patterns of the society, shaping family structures, educational practices, systems of health and care, agricultural rhythms, religious life, and broader social norms. Over time, these patterns harden into a shared way of life that carries both symbolic and material weight. Culture, in this sense, becomes both custom and inheritance, something built, defended, and transmitted. It is therefore unsurprising that those who see themselves as foundational actors in that process may expect later arrivals to understand, respect, and, to some degree, assimilate into those established norms. The boundary is thus protective and an effort to preserve continuity in the face of demographic and economic change.

The chapter contends that racial stratification intensified after emancipation, with White expatriates benefiting from disproportionate upward mobility, as illustrated through important figures such as Phelan and Glover, where Whiteness functioned as social capital. It argues that this pattern has structural continuity in the present, linking colonial-era racial privilege to contemporary expatriate dominance in business and property. Central to this analysis is land, presented as the primary mechanism of power and belonging, from early squatting that cemented ancestral claims to modern beachfront development and gated enclaves.

Ultimately, in this chapter Bodden situates Cayman’s current tensions over race, land, and belonging within its post-slavery formation. He challenges celebratory narratives of expatriate success and argues that meaningful resolution requires confronting the historical foundations of land ownership, migration policy, and racial hierarchy.