Ordering Independence: The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean 1947–69 New, by Spencer Mawby

Spencer Mawby Ordering Independence: The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean 1947-69 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 312 pp. $100 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-23027-818-9Why did federation fail among the British West Indian colonies? Why are the independent nations that emerged from its wreckage mired in poverty and frequent instability? Spencer Mawby sets out to answer these questions in Ordering Independence: The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean 1947-69. Historians of decolonization in the British Caribbean have traditionally focused on the many and often grave failures of the region's colonial political leaders. Recent scholarship has focused on US behind-the-scenes intervention. Mawby's goal is to add the British colonial overlords to the story. In an amusing twist, he writes that he is restoring British agency where it has been ignored. In so doing, Mawby shows that the British were as incompetent and at least as culpable as those whom they had been charged with "apprenticing" in democracy (21).The British had arrogated to themselves the role of teacher, Mawby shows, because of the low regard in which they held the Caribbean peoples. They believed federation was the best way to overcome the dysfunction that grew out of the colonists' "ingrained political immaturity," which manifested itself in irrational and violent behaviour: racial tensions between Africans and East Indians in British Guiana and Trinidad, and between blacks and whites in Barbados; class warfare among Jamaica's "black proletariat," "brown bourgeoisie," and "white oligarchy"; labour unrest and possible mob rule, especially on the small islands; and the danger of Communist subversion throughout the region. Except for Jamaica's Norman Manley, the British disdained the colonies' leaders, many of whom they saw as incipient dictators. Mawby argues that much of this disdain was simple British bigotry: "the quotidian belittlement of Caribbean sensibilities which litter the [British government's] minutes and memoranda of the day certainly evince an innate sense of superiority" (30-31, 247).Federation, so the British Colonial Office argued, would overcome these problems by creating a "sturdier political order" than would independence for each individual island. It would foster cooperation and boost the region's economies through "rational planning" across the islands. This more efficient system, combined with plans for the richer islands to help subsidize the poorer, would lessen the British Exchequer's responsibility-a key point in a worldwide decolonizing empire that suddenly found the colonial cash flow reversing back whence it came (31).Apprenticeship, the British believed, was the only way they could in good conscience devolve power to peoples whom they believed were unready to handle it. Only a methodical, step-by-step release of the reins of power would give Caribbean leaders the chance to acquire the skills needed to maintain democratic order. Mawby persuasively argues that the biggest British failure came from their slow, and at times lethargic, pace in moving toward creation of the West Indies Federation and then independence. Disagreements among the federation's 10 members slowed movement even more. Tied to this political failure was British penuriousness. At a time when pro-federation leaders were telling their people that the British would reward them with social welfare and development money if they would federate, the British responded by promising reductions in aid, thus demonstrating for the Caribbean peoples "the embarrassing evidence" of their federal leaders' "continued impotence. …