Audrey Rees, The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Party (London: Macmillan, 1953)
… The Caribbean had always been one of the Imperial Party’s strongest bases of support outside Britain itself. The combination of a conservative Little England culture and panic over the black and mixed-race population’s increasing assertiveness gave the Imperial platform a strong appeal, and most of the planter elite embraced it willingly. Outside the special case that was Trinidad, the Caribbean was one of the few places where Imperial-aligned governors received complete, and even enthusiastic, cooperation.
This legacy would prove hard to undo after the Imperial Government fell. The incoming National Government moved quickly to replace the Imperial governors, but this changed little on the ground. In the crown colonies, the new governors drew their Executive and Legislative Council appointees from the same elites that had supported the Imperial regime, and their natural sympathies were with this elite rather than the aspirations of the lower classes.
Trinidad even experienced a temporary regression. During the Imperial period, the chamber of commerce and the local military and police commanders had successfully defied London’s policies and had included black and Indian leaders in their consultative council, but the Imperials’ fall marked a return to a conservative executive-council government, albeit with an expansion of the franchise and powers of the elected legislature. The protest movement that had grown up under Imperial rule did not accept this state of affairs, and there were riots in Port of Spain in 1922 and 1924 along with unrest in Barbados and several of the smaller islands.
But the toughest nut to crack would be Jamaica. Unlike the other Caribbean colonies, it had responsible government, and the planter class was wall-to-wall Imperial. Whatever hope the National Government might have had for a peaceful reconciliation between the new governor and the colonial legislature was dashed by the 1922 election, in which the Imperial candidates won all but two seats and after which the party chose a prime minister who was hard-line even by its standards. And while the other Caribbean islands paid lip service to reform even while dragging their feet, the Jamaican government was openly defiant.
Britain could, of course, have revoked Jamaica’s responsible government – it was not a dominion, and Westminster retained full power to legislate for it. But after the way the Imperials had damaged the unwritten constitution, the National Government was unwilling to with it further, and it was wary of the effect that such a move might have in other colonies and domains where responsible government had been achieved. And even after the Socialist-Liberal coalition came in, the growing Irish crisis sucked up the attention that would otherwise have gone to imposing a settlement in Jamaica. A unilateral declaration of independence by the Jamaican government, at a time when Britain and Ireland teetered on the edge of war, could be disastrous.
The result was that Jamaica between 1922 and 1925 was a tug-of-war between the governor and the elected cabinet. The governor vetoed attempts to tighten Imperial-era laws and routinely quashed convictions for sedition or insolence. The government and the police interpreted existing legislation harshly and winked when local planters’ militias used lynch law rather than arrest to deal with dissidents. And the flow of refugees that had begun even before the Imperial period continued unabated after it: in fact, it may even have increased, because the government no longer had British aid in apprehending workers who fled to the mountains or returning those who left by boat.
The Jamaican Imperials’ attempt to hold back the tide was, however, doomed to failure. The withdrawal of British naval patrols worked two ways, allowing guns to enter as well as refugees to leave. The Jamaican diaspora ran guns to the Maroon colonies in the mountains, which had never been fully subdued even in Imperial times, and to the underground on the sugar plantations. The planters had their own sources of arms and volunteers, mainly from the Jim Crow South, but by the mid-1920s the Jim Crow states had problems of their own and couldn’t provide enough aid to overcome the Afro-Atlantic network’s backing of the Jamaican exiles. The spring of 1925 saw large areas of the countryside outside the government’s effective control.
This meant that the Jamaican Imperials would fall with a whimper rather than a bang. By the time London had settled matters in Ulster and was able to give the Jamaican problem its full attention, the government was in dire need of rescue, and Britain was easily able to force it into peace talks as a condition of restoring order. The new constitution promulgated in January 1926 was in some ways a conservative one – the planters’ estates were protected against land reform until 1940, and the upper house would be elected by a property-weighted franchise for at least the same period – but it also introduced universal suffrage for the lower house and local councils, a bill of rights equivalent to Britain’s, and recognition of a right to collective bargaining. The planters would use their remaining control in the upper house to slow the pace of reform, and would complain over drinks in their clubs for decades to come, but their day had passed.
The Imperial era in Jamaica would have two immediate legacies. The first would be the establishment of a far-flung Jamaican diaspora: by 1925, there were significant Jamaican communities in Cuba and Hispaniola; Central America and oil-rich Venezuela; Atlantic Canada and the eastern United States; and even Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Jamaicans in exile had become a full part of the Afro-Atlantic community and would influence many of their host societies, particularly in terms of music, dance and food. The “Mento-Congo” style that swept West Africa and South Carolina in the late 1920s, combining social black comedy and double entendre with syncopated music, owes much to the Jamaican diaspora, as does the Afro-Merengue of the Dominican Republic.
The second consequence would be more ominous, and would be felt less in Kingston than in Caracas. The Venezuelan strongman Alfredo Blanco had followed British affairs closely, including both the Irish and Jamaican settlements, and concluded that Britain had lost its will and forcefulness in the wake of its defeat by India. Both his private journals and the records of Venezuelan cabinet meetings during 1925 make clear that he believed Britain would crumble before a nation that
did have force and will…
Carlos Irizarry, Blanco’s Wars (Mexico City: Nueva España, 1985)
… The series of conflicts known as the “Venezuelan Wars” began in 1922, but their root lies in the Colombian rebellion of 1920. Colombia, alone among the Andean republics, had resisted the tide of Catholic populism during the 1910s by co-opting the moderate ex-Legionnaires and instituting some social reforms while suppressing revolutionary movements. [1] But its social-welfare policies were half-hearted and weren’t nearly enough to satisfy the disenfranchised peasants, especially since there was almost no progress toward land reform. The poor harvest of 1920, which the government did little to alleviate and which forced many peasants into banditry, was the final straw, and by the end of the year, the scattered bands of displaced farmers had coalesced into a
tavarista guerrilla army which called for all estates to be put in Church hands and managed in trust for the people.
The war in the countryside grew slowly during the early part of 1921, with the Tavares government in Peru offering moral support but unable to provide much material aid. But that would change dramatically in the summer. The Blanco regime, which had come into increasing conflict with the Church over its persecution of dissident priests, believed that support of a Catholic-based revolutionary movement might restore its image, and also calculated that a friendly government in Bogota might be willing to resolve long-standing border disputes in its favor. At a meeting in Caracas in August 1921, the Colombian
tavarista leaders made a formal alliance with Blanco, and in return, began receiving massive arms shipments and training.
It was the capture of a Venezuelan advisor by Colombian government forces in February 1922 that would escalate the conflict to the next level. Colombia demanded that Venezuela repudiate its alliance with the
tavaristas and withdraw all advisors from Colombian soil, and when Blanco refused, it tried the advisor as a spy and shot him. Both countries’ armies were already mobilizing by this time, and only days after the execution, Venezuelan riders were rolling across the border.
The invasion of Colombia was not the lightning war that Blanco had hoped for: the mountainous terrain and bad roads made rider warfare difficult, and the Colombian army was able to score some early successes by ambushing Venezuelan columns that outran their support. But these setbacks would be only temporary. The Colombian army was outnumbered and outclassed, with much of its equipment was obsolete even by Great War standards, while Venezuela had used its oil wealth to build a modern military. Venezuela’s air force – a separate command since 1919, and one upon which Blanco had lavished particular attention – was especially effective in destroying Colombian fixed defenses and breaking up troop concentrations. On July 11, 1922, Bogota fell and a
tavarista government was installed, and organized resistance elsewhere in the country ended by the following month.
Thus far, Blanco’s invasion was seen as nothing more than the ordinary rough and tumble of South American warfare, and Colombia’s cession of the entire Guajira peninsula was almost minor by the standards of regional border disputes. But Blanco’s next move alarmed the neighboring countries far more. At the Colombian
tavaristas’ 1923 convention, they voted unanimously to join the Venezuelan Reconstruction Party and to petition for union with Venezuela within a restored Republic of Gran Colombia. Blanco, who had obviously engineered the request, submitted it to the Venezuelan puppet legislature, which approved it in a tumultuous session. Days later, Blanco touched down in Bogota to declare before cheering crowds that Gran Colombia had been restored, and to confer the title of governor-general upon Colombia’s erstwhile president.
The union greatly improved Blanco’s standing in Venezuela, and was even greeted with guarded optimism in Colombia, which hoped to gain some of the oil wealth and was far more willing to entertain a Gran Colombian restoration than to become a Venezuelan province. But Ecuador, which had been part of the original Gran Colombian federation, now feared that it would be next, and Peru was furious over the way the
tavarista revolution had been betrayed for what it saw as militarist and nationalist heresy. In May, an informal alliance was agreed between the two: both began a military buildup, and a detachment of Peruvian troops joined their Ecuadorian comrades along the northern border…
… The next of the Venezuelan Wars did not begin immediately: Blanco spent the remainder of 1923 inaugurating development projects in Colombia, including a canal across the Isthmus of Panama that would, in his words, provide an alternative to the “
yanqui canal” in Nicaragua. And when it did begin, Ecuador was not the victim. Blanco did have Ecuador in his sights as an eventual target, in order to complete the reunification of Gran Colombia, but his immediate desire was for the rich resources of the Amazon. That meant separating Grão Pará from its personal union with Brazil.
If Venezuela’s rider corps had proved disappointing in Colombia, it would be of no use whatsoever in the jungles of Grão Pará, but Blanco had something else in mind. One of the early construction projects he had accomplished with his corps of labor conscripts had been a canal to bypass the Atures Rapids and thus open much of the upper Orinoco to traffic from the Atlantic. He had also carried out improvements on the remote Rio Casiquiare, a unique natural canal that connected the Orinoco to the Rio Negro and therefore to the Amazon basin. And it was through this canal that Venezuela’s riverine fleet descended upon Grão Pará on New Year’s Day, 1924.
Blanco realized that it would be impossible to occupy the entire Amazon, so he settled on a form of river-borne lightning war. Patrol boats with air support would be used to reduce Brazilian garrisons and seize strategic towns, and river-borne transports would set up garrisons at key junctions in order to control river traffic and interdict enemy movements. These garrisons would be resupplied by boat and air, and would also act as airfields from which Venezuelan planes could conduct reconnaissance and strategic bombing. The villages between the garrisons would, for the time being, be left alone, with their pacification to follow after the war was won.
The Venezuelan tactics were, at first, entirely successful. Brazil had not expected war, and although its army and riverine fleet outnumbered Venezuela’s, it had not modernized its military as much as Venezuela had. Much of its fleet was still at a Great War standard, and its aircraft were similar to those that Britain and India had fielded in the early stages of the Indian Revolution rather than the state-of-the-art planes that Venezuela had. By the end of February, tens of thousands of Venezuelan and Colombian conscripts had occupied strategic points surrounding Manaus, and that city – which had remained unconquered throughout the Great War – took only eight weeks to fall to a Venezuelan assault from the air, land and water.
But by then, things had stopped going according to plan. The people of the
quilombos and villages did as they had done during the Great War, using their knowledge of the myriad rivers and portages to get around the Venezuelan strongpoints. They ambushed isolated garrisons and transports, and retreated down tributaries too small for the patrol boats to follow. And Brazil, though slow to react, had more than ten times Venezuela’s population – four times that of Venezuela and Colombia combined – and substantially greater industrial capacity than even Venezuelan oil wealth had been able to finance. The Brazilian army moved troops to Grão Pará in stages, absorbing the losses from Venezuelan air raids, and its navy laid down a class of modern river patrol craft to add to the lend-lease equipment provided by France. The end of 1924 saw Venezuelan positions not much advanced beyond what had been taken in the initial invasion, and an increasing number of troops occupied in holding down the territory that had been conquered.
The Grão Pará campaign had also brought down upon Blanco the definitive wrath of the Church. In a January 1924 encyclical, the Pope in Rio condemned the sins of nationalism and oppression, and declared that Blanco’s government was a betrayal of Christian brotherhood. This had little immediate effect in Venezuela, where Blanco had long since ensured that only compliant priests were allowed to preach, but it undermined support for the regime in Colombia, where the integration of Church institutions into the ruling party was much less advanced. And it also inflamed opinion against Blanco elsewhere in Latin America, with volunteers from Peru, Bolivia and the Southern Cone coming to fight in Grão Pará. Before long, there would even be volunteers from Europe and Africa, serving in what was a new Papal Legion in fact though not in name.
As casualty lists mounted and as word of the Pope’s displeasure filtered to the rank and file, Blanco felt the ground beginning to shift underneath his feet. His response was threefold. The grip of the party and secret police became ever tighter, to the point of being totalitarian, and even private dissent became dangerous. The government also announced a series of domestic reforms, including the institution of the
cabildos de los barrios: councils that supposedly provided direct local democracy in the colonial tradition, but were in fact used to propagandize, mobilize and keep watch on people at the neighborhood level. And, stymied for the moment in the Grão Pará war, Blanco looked for another that would be more victorious…
… Venezuela’s border dispute with British Guiana dated from even before independence: the Spanish Captaincy General of Venezuela and the Republic of Gran Colombia had both claimed everything west of the Essequibo River. In 1925, the new Gran Colombia, as the inheritor of the old, decided that the time was ripe to enforce this claim. Britain, or so Blanco thought, had lost the will to oppose force with force, and would fold if presented with a fait accompli: also, the elimination of one of the last colonial presences in South America would surely shore up his damaged anti-imperial credentials.
June 1925 – the month after the Jamaican planters capitulated and agreed to peace talks – was the time chosen for the attack. On the morning of June 11, Venezuelan paratroops descended on Georgetown and Bartica, overwhelming the local garrisons, and a small patrol fleet left the Orinoco delta and proceeded down the coast toward the mouth of the Essequibo. At the same time, another airborne assault seized Port of Spain to foreclose any counterattack against the fleet by sea or air. These were the first successful large-scale paratroop operations, and by the end of the day, Blanco was proclaiming the liberation of Trinidad and British Guiana and calling on the rest of the British Caribbean to rise and join him.
The military execution of Operation Halcón was nearly perfect. The calculation behind it, however, turned out to be quite the opposite. Whatever quarrels the people of Trinidad had with British colonialism, and they were many, they had no wish to trade it for the Reconstruction Party and labor conscription. What remained of the military garrison and police retreated to the interior and the northern mountains to fight the invaders, and a large part of the population went with them. And London did not react with the resignation that Blanco had expected; instead, Prime Minister Wells declared that he “would not abandon British subjects to be slaves.”
It was clear that the crisis would be a test of the military reforms that Britain had carried out after the Indian Revolution, and it would also be a test of whether the British Empire still had any meaningful existence as a mutual-defense union. The first question was quickly answered in the affirmative: the dominions may have pointedly stayed out of the Indian war, but they agreed to contribute troops to this one, and the West Indian islands also raised several volunteer regiments. Support would in fact come from an entirely unexpected quarter, as the Republic of India, realizing that many of the people fighting the invasion of British Guiana and Trinidad were Indian, offered three brigades of marines and two cruisers from its small blue-water navy. Four years after the end of the Indian War of Independence, British and Indian troops would again fight together.
And they would win. Blanco knew that the tiny Venezuelan seagoing fleet could never win a stand-up fight against the Royal Navy, so he planned to overwhelm them with land-based aircraft as India had done. But the Venezuelan planes were met by both the British carriers’ complement of fighters and their cruiser screen’s heavy main guns and specialized anti-aircraft fire control. Two days of battle off Trinidad resulted in the destruction of Venezuela’s blue-water navy and its northeast air command. Cut off from resupply, the Venezuelan troops on the island held out less than a week after the British landing.
The battle for Guiana would be much tougher: labor conscripts had pushed a road east through the jungle at a cost of thousands of lives, and the Essequibo was flooded with troops and small gunboats. Georgetown fell quickly, but the fighting inland was hard and the terrain difficult, and it was 1926 before the invaders had been pushed back behind the prewar border. Nor was this was not the end for Wells, who by now believed that Blanco would remain a threat as long as he was allowed to stay in place, and had come to consider the war something of a moral crusade. By March, British troops were fighting in Grão Pará, where the Brazilian army was advancing up the Rio Negro, and were also preparing to land in Venezuela itself.
This last involved tense negotiations with the United States: taking back what Britain had already owned was one thing, but invading Venezuelan soil would stretch the Monroe Doctrine near to the breaking point. Fortunately (for Wells if not for Blanco), the Venezuelan government had very little support in Washington, and the administration accepted the planned landings as the continuation of a defensive war. The United States agreed not to object in exchange for Britain’s promise to withdraw from Venezuela once Blanco was removed from power – something it had intended to do anyway – and guarantees that American interests would be protected.
The final phase of the war lasted slightly less than a year. Heavily-fortified Caracas fell after a three-month siege, and the bulk of the Venezuelan army withdrew into the interior. In the meantime, the Colombians, tired of being drafted to fight and labor for a bright future that seemed farther away than ever, rose up behind the lines, and were supported by Peruvian and Ecuadorian troops who crossed the border from the south. By 1927, Colombia was lost and the coastal provinces were in enemy hands, and in February, the military overthrew what was left of the civilian government in San Fernando de Apure and sued for peace…
Alison Gordon, The Reinvention of the Caribbean (Univ. of Kingston Press, 1998)
… The victory in Venezuela, and the Blanco regime’s replacement by a social Catholic government on the Mexican model, was a balm to British morale after the disaster in India. At the same time, it drove home the cost of carrying out even a limited industrial war for an extended period. While Wells’ remark about pawning the crown jewels and laying off the colonies is almost certainly apocryphal, it was clear that Britain could ill afford to maintain an empire in the traditional sense – and that, in Wells’ view and that of many other Socialists, such an empire was not worth maintaining in any event. As it had done with the settler colonies in the 1860s, Britain began to seek a looser relationship with what remained of the empire, passing on more of the burden of administration and defense to the colonies.
Thus was born the Dominion of the West Indies. Like the white dominions, it was a federation of colonies, but unlike them, it was created from the top down rather than forming organically. The idea of a West Indian federation had been suggested before, but it was the province of a few intellectuals: there were no mass federalist movements in the West Indies of the 1920s, nor any political parties that included federalism in their platform. The impetus behind the federation was not the wishes of the West Indians but the well-meaning ministers in London who had decided that a dozen separate colonies were too expensive to rule and defend.
The draft Government of the West Indies Act tabled in the Commons in 1929 provided that each member colony would retain its own government, but that certain matters including defense, central banking, customs, inter-island trade and relations with the empire would rest with a dominion government based in Kingston. The lower house of the dominion legislature would be elected by universal suffrage while the upper house would be appointed by the member states’ governments with the smaller colonies being disproportionately represented. There would be responsible government, but the governor-general would have considerable reserve powers.
It was not lost on the West Indians that many of the small islands still had executive-council governments, meaning that the upper house would be dominated by conservative appointees. It was also not lost on them that Jamaica and Trinidad would be expected to contribute most of the dominion’s budget while being underrepresented in the legislature. Even the grant of internal responsible government and universal suffrage in Trinidad, and an expanded franchise on Barbados, wasn’t enough to make many people happy about the arrangements.
All the same, most were willing to at least give the dominion a chance. Jamaica and Trinidad hoped to dominate the federation economically; the smaller members looked forward to being able to travel more easily and have better access to jobs and imported goods; and British Guiana, still wary of Venezuela, desperately wanted to be part of a mutual-defense pact. There was some talk on a number of islands about rejecting membership in the dominion, and federation was a contested issue in the Trinidad election of 1930, but none of the separatist movements came to power.
The new dominion was thus duly inaugurated on 1 July 1930, and the minor prince who attended the opening ceremonies hailed it as a step toward the “All-Dominion Empire” that was the goal of some members of the coalition. The general election of 1931, however, would prove that West Indian unity was no more than skin-deep, if even that…
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[1] See posts 3570 and 3584.
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