Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962 (review)

With the publication of this book, Jason C. Parker makes an authoritative contribution to the burgeoning literature on the United States and the decolonization of the British West Indies. In his pioneering book, Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940-1964 (1994), Cary Fraser acknowledged that his study could not be considered definitive but had instead been conceived "as a method of opening the subject to wider scrutiny" (p. 4) It is Parker's impressive achievement, fourteen years after the publication of Fraser's study, to significantly advance the examination of the complex tripartite relationships between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the British Caribbean in the process of decolonization. Central to this enterprise is his mastery of the extensive manuscript and archival sources located in twenty-two archives in seven countries. This has allowed him to reconstruct the changing metropolitan policies from multiple perspectives and focus attention on the contribution of "actors on the ground" to the shaping of those policies.

The main chapters of this book are organized in chronological sequence, reflecting the policies of successive administrations on Anglo-American-Caribbean relations. This method of organization has the advantage of presenting a panoramic view of U.S. foreign policy, demonstrating how policy on the British Caribbean was influenced by developments elsewhere and, in turn, shaped policy in the western hemisphere and globally. In his introduction, Parker establishes the parameters of his analysis and identifies the themes that he explores, in detail, in subsequent chapters. Among the key issues which he selects for discussion, on the relations of the Anglo-American-Caribbean triangle, are the American search for national security and the "influence of race-based activism on U.S.-West Indian relations" (p. 12). As Parker indicates, those issues are discussed with special reference to the islands of Jamaica and Trinidad mainly because of Jamaica's ties to black America and Trinidad's importance in U.S. defence plans.

In chapter one, Parker provides the essential background information for the development of the themes that he earlier identified. The Bases-for-Destroyers Deal of 1940 represented an important watershed in Anglo-American-Caribbean affairs but the 1930s was also marked by the convergence of Allied geopolitics, racial trends affecting the hemisphere and colonial turmoil. By the late 1930s, as Parker argues, the Anglo-American policy of "strategic interdependence" in the Caribbean region was changing and the British government increasingly contemplated handing over responsibility for regional security to the United States. The 1930s also witnessed a heightened racial consciousness throughout the African diaspora, in part the result of the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and increased political activities by black West Indian radicals in the United States. In 1936, for example, the Jamaica Progressive League (JPL) which combined Jamaican nationalism with a demand for self-government was established in Harlem—one of twelve organizations formed by West Indian immigrants to agitate for self-determination in their homelands. This concentration of West Indian immigrants in Harlem ensured that the British Caribbean disturbances in those years resonated in the United States.

Parker argues that West Indian expatriates in New York used the security concerns in the Caribbean, which followed on British engagement in Europe against the Nazis, and the extension of American defence responsibilities in the region to lobby for American support for West Indian self-government. One of the main contributions of Parker's book is to establish clearly the links between expatriate West Indians and political leaders in the colonies. The People's National Party in Jamaica under the leadership of N.W. Manley, for example, attracted the moral and financial support of expatriate groups like the JPL. More important, as Parker shows, were the indirect connections between members of the West Indian expatriate community and advisors to President Roosevelt, like Charles W. Taussig, the chairman...