When speaking of decolonisation and post-colonialism, it is essential to avoid the generalising approach which sometimes leads to a distortion of the real. Decolonisation is generally seen as accession to sovereignty. For the elites and the populations of the French Overseas Dependencies it represents a reforming of the bond with France. It is a conversion of what was political subordination into dependence on social and economic resources. This conversion is a rational process based on the following idea: Independence would be costly compared to the advantages of dependence. In other words, Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique would be decolonized without becoming independent. Therefore, the transition from the status of colony to that of ‘departement’ is not a legal contrivance. Even if local populations did not choose their political status through the electoral process, they did vote for the parties which were in favour of French citizenship.

According to Frantz Fanon, decolonisation starts out as ‘a programme of complete disorder’. This idea is interestingly echoed in the Creole expression ‘ce on dezod ka me lod’, which translated means that through chaos comes order. In 1998–1999 Martinique lost 23,000 working days; strikers blockaded the ports of Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe and Fort de France in Martinique for several weeks at a time in 1998. Trade unions have built up membership levels of eighty to ninety per cent in hotels and in public administration. In this article we will be examining some of the consequences and causes of new forms of socio-economic action and political protest that have emerged in the French Caribbean since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the French Caribbean was a haven of relative calm and prosperity in the Caribbean. The Dutch Antilles and Aruba and the British dependent territories (now renamed UK Overseas Territories) have also generally shared this good fortune. Today the relative prosperity of the non-sovereign territories is becoming more marked as independent Caribbean states slip into economic recession and growing poverty, so that their political systems and leaders face an endemic crisis of political legitimacy.

There are two views of British policy toward the Commonwealth Caribbean. One, held most firmly by those with responsibility for British policy, is that Britain is fully engaged with the region and that it remains committed to its welfare. It is exemplified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's website which contains a section entitled ‘Britain's Special Relationship with the Caribbean’. The other, encountered in the Caribbean and by its diplomatic representatives in Britain, as well as by some of those in Britain who have close contact with the region, is that Britain has diluted its commitments and is in a long process of withdrawal from the region. It is exemplified in observations made from time to time by Caribbean High Commissioners in the UK, and none more so than Sir Ron Sanders, the former and current High Commissioner for Antigua and Barbuda who has written on Britain's lack of commitment to the Caribbean.

Dutch colonialism has traditionally focused on the East Indies, rather than the West Indies. Thus when Queen Wilhelmina, while in exile in London, declared in 1942 that the colonies should become autonomous with the words ‘relying on one's own strength, with the will to support each other,’ she was thinking of the East and not so much about Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Yet as it turned out, all constitutional plans, culminating into the Statuut or Charter of the Kingdom of 1954, even though conceived and drafted with the East in mind, was ultimately only applied to the West. The Netherlands East Indies, occupied by Japan during World War II, opted for independence after the War. The Hague did not accept this step and waged both hot and cold wars to fight against Indonesia's independence. This, for the Netherlands traumatic, experience left its traces in Dutch policy regarding its Caribbean territories.

Ethnic hegemony has been the pattern of governance in the Caribbean since the first century of colonialism, with a small but powerful elite of European ancestry directly controlling the destiny of these territories until the 1960s, when a new African-based political hegemony developed. The conquest and subsequent disappearance of the native inhabitants, followed by the steady development of plantation economies on the basis of slave and contract labour, which in turn influenced heavily the emergence of a race-based system of social stratification in these colonies, are too well known to warrant repetition here. The main concern of this paper is to examine, in the context of ethnic and class formations, the political and social dynamics of the post-colonial period with a view to prognosticating probable developments in the ensuing decades of the twenty-first century.

The empire of absolutist Spain haunted the debates over the empire of liberal Spain. To take one example, José Arias y Miranda, an unemployed civil servant who would later work as the librarian for the Ministerio de Ultramar (Overseas Ministry), responded to the Real Academia de la Historia's query on the effects of the American empire on Spain's economy and society in words that would have been familiar to a seventeenth-century arbitrista. After reviewing America's drain on the sparse Spanish population and the corrupting effects of gold, silver, and land on Spanish work habits, Arias y Miranda concluded ‘that America was […] the determining cause of Spain's decadence’.

In the above quotation, the Jesuit, Manuel da Nóbrega, chose a lingua (Gonçalo Alvares) as interlocutor for his Dialogue on the Conversion of Pagans The expression lingua (literally: tongue), in the sense of interpreter, or a person with a gift of oratory in Tupi-language, usually appears in Jesuit letters and catalogues as an attribute of some of its members. For example, in the catalogue of priests and brothers of Bahia, 1566, it is said that Gaspar Lourenco ‘acts as the lingua of Father Antonio Pires’, then vice-provincial of the Mission in Brazil. In another list of Jesuits in the Province of Brazil, in 1600, there are fifty-eight names qualified as linguas, almost one-third of the general members.