If there is one theme which dominates the small literature on postwar American policy towards the anglophone Caribbean it is uncertainty or ambivalence: Cary Fraser's book on the subject was actually called Ambivalent Anti-colonialism and, while the title of Jason Parker's book is suggestive rather than explicit in indicating his central concerns, at an early point he explains that the relationship “is best conceived of as a uniquely ‘protean partnership’ in the hemisphere” (8). At the beginning and towards the end of the text Parker invokes the myths of both Proteus and Cain. Despite the absence of a mortal crime, Cain's situation is said to parallel “the hegemon's dilemma” of how a large power, like the United States, can regulate what ought to be a fraternal relationship with its smaller hemispheric partners. At another point the United States is portrayed as Menelaus, trying to tame the shape-shifting Proteus, incarnated in the form of the unstable political systems of the anglophone Caribbean territories at the end of empire. These are thought-provoking metaphors, interesting as much for the dissimilarities between the mythical prototypes and mid-twentieth-century international politics as they are for the persuasive suggestion that the American government was preoccupied with the rational regulation of an intrinsically difficult and unpredictable relationship.
Aside from these allegorical features, what is most striking about Parker's book is the exceptional quality of the research and analysis. Brother's Keeper covers twenty-five years of an eventful history and encompasses domestic, regional and international aspects of the Caribbean policy of the United States. Initially, prominence is given to the role of diasporan solidarity as a factor in American policy during the 1930s. Parker offers a convincing argument that the presence of Jamaican and other Caribbean migrants in New York became a factor in the Roosevelt administration's promotion of social and economic reform in Britain's Caribbean colonies. In the second half of the book he emphasizes the foreboding which American policymakers felt when contemplating the emergence of democratic, nationalist politics in the region; this was epitomized by Eric Williams's campaign against the American military base at Chaguaramas in Trinidad during the late 1950s. International factors added a further layer of complexity as it became evident that American obligations to their European ally in London could potentially conflict with the imperative to demonstrate an understanding of the congenial kind of nationalist anti-imperialism espoused by local politicians such as Norman Manley of Jamaica.
A tripartite chronological division emerges in the book which emphasizes discontinuity in American policy. During the Roosevelt presidency the role of expatriate West Indians in Harlem is a key theme. Roosevelt's sponsorship of Charles Taussig's Caribbean reformism is placed firmly in the context of domestic American politics and Parker argues that it was the existence of “transnational diasporan energies” (66) which differentiated the case of Britain's Caribbean colonies from other examples of decolonization. The Truman era is dealt with in a single chapter and is characterized as transitional; the best that can be said for it, in Parker's view, is that it did not “precipitate the disaster that so often followed US policy into the decolonizing Third World.” It was only in the Eisenhower and Kennedy period that the full force of the Cold War began to be felt in American policy towards the anglophone Caribbean. Although in principle the United States supported local nationalists, American pursuit of national security objectives could undermine this stance. These ambiguities in American policy were still unresolved when Trinidad and Jamaica became independent in 1962.
Parker has presented a convincing argument supported by excellent research and some persuasive writing but there are two caveats: one formal and forgivable, the other methodological and inexplicable. As the foregoing indicates, the book tends to divide American policy rather neatly between presidencies; this presents an exaggerated picture of discontinuity and impedes Parker's efforts to restore agency to local actors. On the positive side of the ledger this does add coherence to a potentially confusing narrative and assists in the process of developing some clean lines of argument. By contrast, the decision to pay no attention whatsoever to the autobiographical works by Trinidad's first Prime Minister, Eric Williams, or other Caribbean leaders is baffling. Williams's Inward Hunger, which was first published in 1969, is a classic of anti-imperialist writing. Other significant works by Albert Gomes and C. L. R James are also excluded from the otherwise comprehensive bibliography. Readers will, however reluctantly, have to forgive these omissions because, in all other respects, this is an immensely impressive work of scholarship.
