Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. 1, Not for Turning, by Charles Moore
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014564662 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Jack Cunningham |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
While Mawby is excellent and persuasive in his description and analysis of why
the federation collapsed, he fails to explain why the British were so slow in moving
toward independence for the federation and so quick to devolve power to inde-
pendent island governments that they believed would end in economic chaos, civil
unrest, and dictatorship. The reader comes away with a sense that the British
Colonial Office inadvertently devolved so much freedom to their individual
island colonies in a fit of absentmindedness while it focused its real work on getting
the federation exactly right. Mawby does not offer this or any other explanation.
Ordering Independence begins and ends with a recounting of the British
Caribbean’s tragic history under independent rule. No country has prospered.
Guyana and Grenada were ruled by dictators. Guyana and Trinidad are riven
by ethnic tensions. Trinidad foiled an attempted coup; Grenada suffered two
coups and a US invasion. Jamaica is gang-ridden. Antigua’s government degener-
ated into a dynastic kleptocracy. Historians have blamed the Caribbean leadership
for these ills, but Mawby argues that the British colonizer, which – along with
democracy – apprenticed the Caribbean in authoritarianism as it sought to main-
tain stability, was at least as much to blame.
Mawby admits that while decolonization has ended badly in the British
Caribbean, it is not fair to focus on the region’s outlying political crises at the
expense of its overall political stability, but it is also unjust to ignore the poverty
and desperation of so many while focusing on the region’s relative political stabil-
ity. True enough.
Another way to look at the decolonized British Caribbean, however, is to com-
pare it with independent British Africa. All the evils that were experienced by the
entire British Caribbean are equivalent to the evils suffered by Ghana from 1958 to
1981—and Ghana’s next 10 years were almost as tumultuous. Nigeria, Sudan,
Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Uganda have had it much worse. Nine out of 12
former British Caribbean colonies have maintained democracy throughout their
history. Two of the 16 British African colonies can make this claim. At the risk of
committing a heresy, perhaps the British Colonial Office, arrogant and inept as it
often was, did a better than utterly incompetent job in devolving independence to
its Caribbean colonies.
Charles Moore
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. 1, Not for Turning
London: Allen Lane, 2013. 895 pp. $39.00 (cloth)
ISBN 978–0713992823
Reviewed by: Jack Cunningham, Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History,
University of Toronto
The first volume of Charles Moore’s official biography of Margaret Thatcher is in
some ways surprising. Presumably picked for the task because of his Thatcherite
predilections, the long-time Tory journalist wrote with exclusive access to the
172 International Journal 70(1)
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