In this post, Jacob Bright, a student in the MA in Latin American Studies programme, writes about the research for his dissertation, which was awarded the Elsa Goveia prize for the best dissertation on the Caribbean. 

Policing in the Post-Colonial State: The Politics of Militarised Policing in Jamaica, 1962-1976 

 Jacob Bright 

Policing in Jamaica during the 1960s and 1970s was militarised and violent. This is usually attributed to political pressures, colonial legacies, and social failures: insecure leaders facing partisan competition, growing societal unrest, and threats to their authority turned to repression to maintain control. As revealed through my research in the National Archives, this history is, however, incomplete.  

Empire remained deeply entangled with Jamaica’s security long after independence in 1962. This was not colonial influence fading away, but an intentional policy that enabled convergence with British interests through training programmes, personnel exchanges, and the grooming of leadership. 

British officials worked to ensure Jamaican policing developed “along British lines”, maintaining regional influence and alignment on security priorities. Foreign powers, particularly Britain, wielded considerable influence over Jamaica’s security infrastructure through the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and Jamaica Defence Force (JDF). The JCF was formed in 1867 after the Morant Bay Rebellion and underwent little change over the following century. The JDF, created in 1962, was commanded by British officers until 1965, inheriting the structure, tactics, and repressive mentality of its imperial predecessor. Both remained institutional legacies of colonial control.   (more…)

In this post, Steve Cushion, Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of the Americas, and a former PhD student of the department, reflects on his most recent book.

Slavery in the British Empire and Its Legacy in the Modern World

Steve Cushion

My original motivation for writing this book was to bypass the apparently interminable discussion about whether “Britain” had, or had not, profited from slavery and the trafficking in enslaved Africans. Basing the discussion on macroeconomic statistics seemed to me to miss the point that Britain is divided into social classes and interest groups. This book has sought to address that gap by examining those who gained so much from the business of slavery, using examples of major businessmen, bankers, and commodity traders, as well as landowners and enslavers, all of whom placed profit before people. Their fabulous wealth contrasted starkly with the overwhelming majority of the population of Britain, who lived in abject poverty. Trickle-down economics was no more a reality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than it is today. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England describes most workers and poor farmers earning only enough to survive – a subsistence income that barely allowed them to maintain their ability to work.

Profit and loss take place at the level of individual enterprises. A single businessman making an exceptional profit can be significant in promoting economic development, but his role is obscured if we only look at average figures and global statistics. The fact that many of the early developers of industrialisation, as well as their financiers, made their initial capital through slavery and trafficking is therefore more important than the generalisations. (more…)