In 1962, amidst the Cuban Revolution, Third World decolonization, and the African American freedom movement, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became the first British West Indian colonies to gain independence. These were not only the first new nations in the western hemisphere in more than fifty years; they also won their independence without the bloodshed that marked so much of the decolonization struggle elsewhere. Jason Parker's international history of the peaceful transition in these islands analyzes the roles of the United States, Britain, the West Indies, and the transnational African diaspora in the process, from its 1930s stirrings to its Cold War culmination. Grounded in exhaustive research conducted in seven countries, Brother's Keeper offers an original rethinking of the relationship between the Cold War and Third World decolonization.

Based on archival research on three continents, this book addresses the interpenetration of two closely related movements: the struggle against white supremacy and Jim Crow in the U.S., and the struggle against similar forces and for national liberation in Colonial Kenya.

In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

Spencer Mawby analyses the conflicts between the British government and Caribbean nationalists over regional integration, the Cold War, immigration policy and financial aid in the decades before Jamaica, Trinidad and the other territories of the Anglophone Caribbean became independent.

The extension to other Realms of the reserve power to refuse a dissolution