When Jamaica achieved independence in 1962, in the aftennath of a referendum over its membership of the West Indies Federation, this was more an expression of distrust of the other British Caribbean colonies than an upwelling of latent nationalism. That some sections of the middle stratum of its society were developing a sense of Jamaican (as well as West Indian) identity, through politics and the arts, is not in doubt; but Jamaica's ‘no’ to Federation was largely an expression of its insularity and its unwillingness to be burdened with responsibility for the smaller and economically weaker territories, as distinct from a burning desire to be independent on its own. Prevailing Jamaican attitudes at that time were insular and colonial; put pejoratively, they were parochial and imitative. If these isolationist views were more extreme than those expressed elsewhere in the Federation, it was because Jamaica was more isolated from the rest than they were from one another; it was larger, and had, so it seemed, more to lose and less to gain from Federation than its temporary bed-fellows.

Blockaded but not captured by the Axis Powers during World War 11, unlike many European colonies in South-east Asia, the British West Indies of the 1940s and 1950s were prized at the UK Colonial Office for their loyalty to the Crown and their swift acceptance of gradual, constitutional decolonization. Colonialism had been an established fact in the Caribbean for more than three centuries; virtually no antecedent peoples or cultures remained; scarcely a pre-European archaeological site worth visiting could be found. British West Indian societies were entirely creations of empire, and more especially of the systems of forced labor that had been deployed during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to operate the sugar plantations. Local political elites, increasingly elected after 1945, had been socialized to treasure Pax Britannica, and to appreciate and imitate British institutions and values.