Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle: The Constitutional Decolonization of the Eastern Caribbean (review)

As the historiography of decolonization has come into its own in recent decades, it has expanded both its geographical scope and its conceptual sophistication. A considerable portion of the newer studies have been greatly influenced by three developments. First, just as "empire as a two-way street" has become a conceptual mainstay, so too has decolonization come to be seen in that same light. That is, the intensely reciprocal nature of the bilateral exchange between metropole and colony, before and after the transition to independence, has come to the fore. Second, the cultural aspects of the exchange are in more prominent view than had been the case in earlier scholarship, which tended to favor a more narrowly political approach. Finally, as the geographical scope has widened, it has brought into view the smaller, often-forgotten theaters of decolonization. These had been overshadowed by their neighbors caught in bloodier transitions—especially those distorted by the incursion of the Cold War into their struggles—which then came to dominate the narrative. The inclusion of the smaller theaters helps to correct this imbalance, and to present a fuller scholarly tableau.

Rafael Cox Alomar's Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle is somewhat out of step with the first two—but is no less a historiographical contribution for "only" hitting the third mark. It examines the decolonization process in the British colonies of the late-1960s Eastern Caribbean—remote in both time and place from the more dramatic high-water marks of the process earlier and elsewhere. Cox Alomar places the story within two important overlapping relationships: Britain to its shrinking late empire, and the Anglo-American alliance. The book is more gap-filling than path-breaking, but it does, by that token, achieve most of what it sets out to do. While the book on occasion overestimates the uniqueness of the Eastern Caribbean story, Cox Alomar does successfully deploy it to articulate a larger argument about the fundamental fluidity, contingency, and asymmetry of the decolonization process.

The Eastern Caribbean islands of Cox Alomar's study—Barbados, Antigua-Barbuda, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada—all found themselves in a kind of limbo after the collapse of the West Indies Federation (WIF) in 1962. The WIF had been intended to be a vehicle for the British Caribbean's transition from colony to internal self-government to full sovereign independence. Its design reflected the prevailing beliefs of the postwar decades—beliefs shared by the Colonial Office, the State Department, and many West Indian nationalists alike—about "viability," modernization, and nation-hood. The withdrawals of Jamaica and Trinidad from the WIF, following a September 1961 referendum in the former, doomed the union. The collapse was part of a more or less worldwide failure of such federations, a story itself largely neglected by historians and one which this book helps to rectify. In many such cases, as centrifugal pressures led the largest actors (like Jamaica) to withdraw in favor of solo independence, their departure redirected those pressures toward the next-largest remaining. In the Eastern Caribbean, this pointed to Barbados as the key unit for any such rump union that might be constructed after the WIF's fall. After that proved unworkable—in part for similar reasons to those that had led Jamaica and Trinidad to go it alone a few years earlier—the British and island governments were left to improvise. Their solution was to concoct a gray-area status of relations—"free association"—somewhere short of independence but ostensibly still en route to that destination, one at which most of the islands finally arrived by gradual "installments" in the next decade.

This pattern—a flawed federal design and individual-unit initiative that led to the largest unit leaving—was thus true in its broad outlines for all of London's West Indian colonies save British Guiana. Cox Alomar's study, in a sense, confirms its continuation. Other aspects of the pre- and post-WIF devolution of...