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Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a severe capitalist economic and financial crisis that intensified in the 1930s. The response in the British Caribbean during the 1930s was in the form of rebellions that demanded colonial reform. The ensuing struggles resulted in constitutional and political changes that led to decolonization and independence. In Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period, Hilbourne Watson examines the contradictory process through the lens of political economy and class analysis, informed by an internationalist historical perspective that centres the concerns and interests of the working class. Britain freed the colonies in ways that reflected its own subordination to US hegemony under the rubric of the Cold War, which served as the geopolitical strategy for liberal internationalism. Watson's analysis concentrates on the roles played by the labour movement, political parties, capitalist interests, and working-class and other popular organizations in Barbados and the British Caribbean, with support from Caribbean-American groups in New York that forged alliances with those black American organizations which saw their freedom struggles in an international context. Practically all the decolonizing (nationalist) elites in Barbados and other British Caribbean territories endorsed a British and American prescription for decolonization and self-government based on territorial primacy and at the expense of a strong West Indian federation that prioritized the working class. This move sidelined the working class and its interests also set back the struggle for self-determination, liberty and sovereignty. Watson situates the role Errol Barrow played in the transformation of Barbados in the wider Caribbean and international context. His study draws on archival records from Britain and Barbados, interviews and other sources, and he pays close attention to how the racialization of social life around nature, culture, history, the state, class, gender, politics, poverty and other factors conditioned the colonial experience. -- back cover.

This original and exciting book examines the processes of nation building in the British West Indies. It argues that nation building was a more complex and messy affair, involving women and men in a range of social and cultural activities, in a variety of migratory settings, within a unique geo-political context. Taking as a case study Barbados which, in the 1930s, was the most economically impoverished, racially divided, socially disadvantaged and politically conservative of the British West Indian colonies, *Empire and nation-building* tells the messy, multiple stories of how a colony progressed to a nation. It is the first book to tell all sides of the independence story and will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists interested in the history of Empire, the Caribbean, of de-colonisation and nation building.

En 1971, durante una época de dictaduras y proyectos modernizadores autoritarios en América Latina, un grupo de antropólogos publicó la Declaración de Barbados, en denuncia del genocidio de los pueblos indígenas y para exigir su liberación. Los balances tras 50 años de la declaración destacan el surgimiento de un amplio movimiento que llevó a una mayor articulación política de los indígenas en este contexto. Con base en registros inéditos de la reunión de 1971, este artículo examina algunos antecedentes de ladeclaración, a la luz de las discusiones sobre una antropología comprometida, latinoamericana y del Sur, en boga desde entonces. Planteamos que la originalidad de Barbados anticipó preocupaciones contemporáneas sobre decolonialidad, con un potencial teórico y metodológico aún vigente. In 1971, amid an era of dictatorships and authoritarian modernization projects across Latin America, a group of anthropologists issued the Barbados Declaration, denouncing the genocide of Indigenous peoples and calling for their liberation. Fifty years later, retrospective analyses highlight the emergence of a broad movement that played a key role in the Indigenous political mobilization in the region. Drawing on previously unpublished records from the 1971 meeting, this article examines the key antecedents of the Declaración de Barbados in light of ongoing debates on engaged anthropologies, Latin American anthropologies, and anthropologies of the Global South. We argue that the Barbados Declaration’s originality lies in its early articulation of concerns now central to decolonial thought, offering theoretical and methodological insights that remain relevant today.

This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives. We complicate the common-sense notion that class is a stable structure that allows for the categorization of people by providing a nuanced look into the lived experiences of students and alumni at this elite school. We focus on the wearing of uniforms, the use of technological devices, the deployment of language, and student-lead articulations of social class in an increasingly globalized space. Class is defined and (re-)shaped by students' belongings and longings, all of which, too, are, mutable, and can readily mutate in accordance with local and global circumstances of supply and demand.

In this Article, we examine the colonial experiences of eight formerly British-controlled territories—Barbados, Jamaica, Botswana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Burma, and Singapore—to identify how the processes and policies of the colonial enterprise affected their respective contemporary rule of law outcomes. While acknowledging the legal origins thesis that the British transplantation of the common law to its colonial territories conferred upon such recipient societies the institutional tools necessary and sufficient to promote the subsequent achievement of strong development outcomes, we note the diversity of modern rule of law indicators among former British colonies and question what heretofore unexplored dynamics of the colonial institutional environment may explain such divergent results. Based upon our investigations of the various governance models employed by the British, and, more significantly, the degree of responsiveness to citizen needs such institutional arrangements provided, we identify two features of colonial administration and legal transplantation whose anecdotal significance suggests to us some theoretical importance for these factors in the promotion of a long-run, stable commitment to legality in these countries (or lack thereof): (1) the degree of representation in legislative bodies afforded to the indigenous population; and (2) the extent to which indigenous and British common law courts and animating values were integrated, fostering the development of a localized common law jurisprudence. In this way, we not only seek to explain how the colonial experience influenced subsequent rule of law outcomes in these eight countries, but also to employ the lessons of the past to inform our current understanding of the dynamics of institutional development, particularly in the legal arena.

In December 1832, less than a year before the British Parliament passed the first imperial slave emancipation bill, an all-white jury in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados convicted a black, enslaved man named Robert James of having robbed and sexually violated Margaret Higginbotham, an impoverished white widow and mother. Since Robert James was a black man accused of raping a white woman the jury's decision could hardly have surprised anyone and his rapid dispatch by a hangman must have been universally expected.

This thesis examines the determinants of a strong rule of law in post-colonial societies by comparing Jamaica and Barbados, two countries with many similarities, but with divergent outcomes concerning the rule of law. The research takes a comparative historical approach, specifically investigating the origins of the divergence of the rule of law between Jamaica and Barbados during the transition to independence. The analysis suggests that the extent of communal divisions influenced the political culture of the masses during the transition to universal suffrage in the late colonial period. This proved to be the critical factor that determined whether political violence and patronage politics were institutionalized, which ultimately led to the deterioration in the capacity of the state to promote the rule of law. Differences along four key dimensions (the extent of a race-class correlation, the extent to which the Afro-Caribbean population viewed themselves as members of the national community, the orientation of the religion of the lower classes towards the established order, and the structural conditions that facilitated the cultural autonomy of the lower classes) developed between the two islands during the early colonial period that influenced the formation of communal divisions along class lines, which in turn influenced the political culture of the masses. In Jamaica, the ethnic division between the lower and middle classes led the former to adopt a political culture that challenged the authority of the colonial state, which, combined with the inaction of colonial authorities, ultimately resulted in the establishment of a democratic political system based on violence, lawlessness and patronage that emerged during a critical period of instability on the island (the transition to both universal suffrage and independence). In Barbados, the absence of communal divisions resulted in the adoption of the dominant political culture by the masses. As such, there was broad-based acceptance of the legitimacy of legal state authority, with all major political parties appealing to the electorate on a rational basis, thereby hindering the escalation and institutionalization of political violence and clientelism. Moreover, the compatibility between the political culture and the state authority structure in Barbados provided the foundation for a strong rule of law during the post-colonial period.