This thesis places the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, formed in 1942, within the context of the Anglo-American wartime 'special relationship' and examines the political, economic and security motives which lay at the heart of this unique collaboration. Promoted as means for rectifying the problems of a region of extreme need, the AACC only exposed and exacerbated the underlying antagonisms between Britain and the US over the economic and political structure of the world. Debates within the AACC over the role of the West Indian sugar industry, the regulation of tariffs and trade and the future of civil aviation mirrored wider rivalries between Britain and the US over the post-war world economy, the colonial world and their respective roles within a new economic order. What emerges is a picture of the AACC as a vehicle for maintaining the regional security interests of the US and for promoting its broader ambitions for the post-war world in the British territories of the Caribbean. For Britain, who resisted the collaboration, the AACC was part of the price which had to be paid for obtaining American friendship and material assistance in the war effort. The story of the AACC is significant not only for the light it shed upon the Anglo-American wartime relationship and how it exposed the antagonisms which lay so close to its surface, but also for the way it revealed the determination of the US to use the exigencies of war to impose its economic ideals upon Britain and of the tenacity of the Empire to defend even the smallest and least regarded of its possessions. The AACC was a battleground of conflicting British and American visions of a 'new' West Indies, a struggle that scarred the AACC from its inception and eventually led to its death as a truly Anglo-American enterprise.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:636589 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Whitham, A. C. |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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