:Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962

Jason C. Parker uses the cases of two British Caribbean colonies, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, to explore what he terms a “central puzzle of twentieth-century foreign relations and international history scholarship”: that is, the nature of the “relationship between Third World decolonization and the Cold War” (p. 4). His book is a political history that highlights negotiations among politicians and government officials, primarily those of the United States, Great Britain, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica. But with his emphasis on the significance of the African diaspora in Cold War-era policy decisions, Parker has opted to include non-political actors in these exchanges and to consider the importance of race as well as national security issues during this fraught period. The result is a complex but never confusing narrative based on impressive archival scholarship. In examining this subject, Parker makes a solid contribution to the historical scholarship of the twentieth-century British Caribbean and the African diaspora. Although it is no longer accurate to say the post-emancipation British Caribbean has been neglected by historians, the period examined by Parker has received relatively limited attention from members of this profession. Yet the years between the labor unrest of the 1930s and independence in the 1960s and 1970s are important. They saw the emergence of political parties, the slow growth of political autonomy, the rise and fall of the West Indies Federation, and the arrival of independence in much of the region. These developments did not matter only to West Indians; as Parker argues, the U.S. and British governments and members of the African diaspora watched these events closely. As British colonies located on the “doorstep of a hegemonic superpower” (p. 5) and as the birthplace of many blacks resident in the United States, the British Caribbean was of great, albeit intermittent, interest to all three.

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