Chapter 1 Introduction

Notes Chapter 1 Introduction 1 The map at the front of the book shows clearly just how contiguous these territories are. St Lucia is an island of 620 square kilometres with a population of approximately 176,000 (2011). The island gained independence from Britain on the 22nd February 1979. St Vincent and the Grenadines is actually a multi-island nation with a total land area of 389 square kilometres, of which St Vincent, the principal island, accounts for 345. The other significantly inhabited islands are Bequia, Mustique, Canouan and Union, and the total population of the country is roughly 119,600 (2011). Independence from Britain was achieved on the 27th October 1979. Throughout the book, references to ‘St Vincent’ are generally taken to mean the whole territory unless specified otherwise. Martinique is a single-island territory which has an area of 1,128 square kilometres, a population of 399,000 (2011). Guadeloupe is a multi-island territory, comprising Guadeloupe, the principle island (which accounts for the vast majority of the population and area) and its tiny dependencies La Désirade, Les Saintes and Marie-Galante, with a combined area of 1,628 square kilometres and a population of 447,000 (2011). As well as Martinique and Guadeloupe, there exist two other French Départements d’Outre Mer: French Guiana which borders Brazil on the South American continent and Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean near to Madagascar and Mauritius. 2 The French DOM are ‘Overseas Departments’, an administrative status which is broadly analogous to that of a British County. They are also sometimes called Départements Français d’Amérique (DFA), which, translated, means ‘French Departments of America’, and carries the same meaning as DOM. At times they are also described as DOM-ROM, meaning Overseas Departments and Regions; this belies their peculiar constitutional status, which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. 3 This is a particular problem in the technical work which is undertaken by the development agencies and donors. We find the academic amalgamation of ‘Latin America’ and ‘the Caribbean’ that takes place to be somewhat con- trived, based largely on their geographical proximity. Moreover, this is some- thing that is usually done to serve the administrative purposes of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the principal multilateral technocratic organisation charged with the task of observing the region, and often the worst culprit. 4 As a consequence, it should be noted that much of the tables of data in Part II of the book were compiled with great difficulty. As such, the specific figures should, in many cases, be taken as approximations as they often involved a great deal of searching and, at times, significant manipulation to render them useful. In a sense, though, the data used in the book are mainly illustrative; in most cases large disparities exist between the two sets of 215 216 Notes islands, and it is consequently quite clear what the general pattern is, even if the specific accuracy of the data itself involves, to some extent, a margin of error. This should be borne in mind, especially, in Chapter 7, where the tables of data were compiled with great difficulty and with after painstaking research and calculations. Chapter 2 The Caribbean: A Global History 1 As a white European conducting research into the impact of colonialism upon former slave societies, the pitfalls into which one could inadvertently wander are many. This is no more apparent than when discussing race or using terms which, in different places and different languages, are loaded with often pejorative meaning. For example, French West Indians are quite happy using the term nègre, which for them carries even less residual meaning than ‘Negro’ in English. However the same word would be consid- erably more offensive were it uttered by a white Metropolitan mouth in mainland France. Likewise, ‘mulatto’ is generally considered unacceptable in the modern US, however preferable terms such as ‘biracial’ or ‘mixed race’ do not quite capture the same meaning as the French mulâtre, which is still widely used in the DOM. Cognisant of these difficulties, ‘mulatto’ will be used throughout the book in both its specific historical sense – French Caribbean people with both European and African ancestry (see James 2001) – and also to refer to the coloured middle-classes in the wider Francophone, and to a lesser extent, Anglophone West Indies. Although also unsatisfactory, the term ‘coloured’ will be used from time to time to describe the brown-skinned middle classes of the region. Where the term ‘Antillean’ or ‘Antilles’ is used, this is intended to refer exclusively to the French Caribbean and not the Anglophone islands. 2 As we noted in the introduction to the book, this was dramatically illus- trated by the fact that, at the conclusion of the Seven Years War, France ceded huge swaths of North America in exchange for Guadeloupe and a few other territories off of the eastern seaboard of Canada, such as St Pierre and Miquelon. 3 As Eric Williams (1970: 339) points out, there was a stark contrast between the British approach to the ‘white’ colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada and the bigoted, begrudging view of its role, guided by the ‘white man’s burden’ in the ‘coloured’ West Indies. Gordon Lewis (1968: 108) adds that the West Indian people were keenly aware of the fact that ‘British colonial policy operated a vicious double standard, with dominion status as the accepted goal for the white colonies and the Crown Colony system for the Negro colonies’. 4 The Crown Colony system, in essence, saw all power invested in the governor. This contrasted with the French mode of colonial government, which, over time, gradually saw the implementation of local versions of metropolitan institutions with – crucially – representation for the colonial people in Paris. 5 As we noted in the introduction to the book, there are four Overseas Departments of France: Réunion in the Indian Ocean, French Guiana and Notes 217 the two Eastern Caribbean territories, all of which comprise the so-called ‘old colonies’. This gives them a fundamentally different role in the French post-colonial consciousness than, say, Cameroon, or, indeed, any of the territories which were colonised much later. 6 This means ‘the lords of Haiti, the gentlemen of Martinique, and the humble folk of Guadeloupe’. 7 It is worth making a note on the different regimes that governed France throughout the turbulent 80 years that followed the Revolution of 1789. The Constituent Assembly of July 1789 emerged from the bourgeois middle classes and promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man a month later, dissolving in September 1791 as King Louis XVI accepted a new constitutional monarchy. The Legislative Assembly which replaced it lasted just a year and was replaced by the Convention, which saw the birth of Republican France from September 1792. It was this body which drew up, arguably, the most utopian constitution ever witnessed, although it would remain suspended, never to be introduced, as the French Revolution entered its most bloody phase – The Terror that was perpetrated by the notorious Committees of Public Safety and General Security – as it faced unprecedented challenges from every conceivable angle. The First Republic was replaced by the Napoleonic Empire from 1802 until 1814 whereupon the Bourbon Monarchy was reinstalled. The Bourbons were then over- thrown again in 1830 to make way for the Orléanist ‘July Monarchy’ until revolution broke out once more in 1848, leading to the short-lived Second Republic. This regime was supplanted by the Second Empire of Napoleon III from 1852, which itself came to an end after the disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and rising discontent from urban workers generated by the upheavals of the industrial revolution. It was replaced, in 1871, by the eventual establishment of the Third Republic which would endure until World War II and the collaborationist Vichy Regime. 8 The Békés are, peculiarly, the sole remnants of pre-revolutionary France remaining in the entire Republic today, given that their ancestors escaped the guillotine which eviscerated almost the entire French nobility during the British occupation of the early 1790s. 9 With memories still fresh of the young United States’ own position as an appendage of the British Empire, the doctrine was an early and intimidat- ing indication of the philosophy that would hitherto guide US policy towards the Americas. As Williams (1970: 411) notes, President Monroe ‘announced to the world firstly that the United States would regard any attempt by the colonial powers to extend the colonial system in the New World as dangerous to its peace and safety; secondly, pledged itself not to interfere with the existing colonies; thirdly, with respect to the colonies which had declared their independence, “could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other light, than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States”’. 10 Highlighting the simultaneous rise of American power and decline of British power, Rafael Cox-Alomar (2003: 76) recounts a 1957 exchange between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan. The US President suggests that ‘the US Government and its people are vitally 218 Notes interested in the Caribbean region’ to which MacMillan responded ‘all this liquidation of colonialism is going so well that I would be sorry if there was any hitch, especially one in the Caribbean!’. It is worth adding here that there was significant US suspicion of the British attitude towards the West Indies, ‘an area of the world where no vital British interests and few strat- egic considerations were at stake and thus the fundamental aim should be “political disengagement”’.

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