Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana's Struggle for Independence

Colin Palmer. one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. At the center of the story is Cheddi Jagan, the U.S.- educated, Indian-descended dentist-cum-politician who was the colony's first premier following the institution of universal adult suffrage in 1953.

Informed by the first use of many British, U.S., and Guyanese archival sources, Palmer's work details Jagan's rise and fall, from his initial electoral victory in the spring of 1953 to the aftermath of the British-orchestrated coup d'etat that led to the suspension of the constitution and the removal of Jagan's independence-minded administration.

Jagan's political odyssey continued---he was reelected to the premiership in 1957---but in 1964 he fell out of power again under intense pressure from Guianese, British, and U.S. officials suspicious of Marxist influences on the People's Progressive Party, the popular nationalist party founded in 1950 by Jagan and his activist wife, Janet Rosenberg. But Jagan's political life was not over---after decades in the opposition, he became Guyana's president in 1992.

Subtly analyzing the actual role of Marxism in Caribbean anticolonial struggles, Palmer examines the often malevolent roles played by leaders at home and abroad and shows how violence, police corruption, political chicanery, racial politics, and poor leadership delayed Guyana's independence until 1966, scarring the body politic in the process. By placing the fracturing of British Guiana's social order in the full context of the social, racial, and economic roots of the colony's political culture, Palmer brings the larger story of Caribbean colonialism into focus.

Colin A. Palmer is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University.