Introduction. Making Our Constitutions Our Own

• Author: Simeon C.R. McIntosh
• Profession: Professor Emeritus of Law at Howard University, Washington, DC
• Pages: 1-50

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Introduction

Introduction

Making Our Constitutions Our Own

On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the Barbados Parlia-

ment, the then Governor-General, the late Sir Hugh Springer,

remarked that ‘Our Constitution came from Britain but a dozen

generations of Barbadians have made it their own.’1These words,

in fact, tell the story of the historical relationship of the entire

Commonwealth Caribbean with Britain, the imperial power, and

more specifically, of the process of constitutional founding and of

the method of acquiring our Independence Constitutions and the

substance of their provisions. So although Sir Hugh Springer’s

words may hardly do justice to the profundity of the historian’s

enterprise of crafting the social memory of our people, they are

nonetheless the most compelling part – the ‘core’ – of any possi-

ble narrative construction of our political identity. As Professor

Norma Thompson remarks: ‘The stories that succeed most com-

pellingly in accounting for the “facts” of a people’s past become

the core of that people’s political community.’2

West Indian Independence Constitutions, which are, for all intents

and purposes, written versions of the constitutional arrange-

ments that evolved in the United Kingdom over many centuries,

have had their formal juridical origins in statutes of the British

Imperial Parliament, and trace their historical beginnings back to

July 1627, when the King of England granted letters patent to

James, first Earl of Carlisle, ‘over the whole of the Caribee

Islands, from 10º to 20º north latitude; a wide range which made

express mention of Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Barbados,

Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, and St.

Christopher, as well as smaller islands.’3Thus was born, accord-

ing to Professor Lloyd Best, ‘the political system of the West

Indies’, which was marked by a series of developmental changes

through the centuries to the granting of political independence

from the 1960s to the 1980s.4These developmental changes can

be said to have begun in earnest with the emancipation of the

slaves in the West Indian colonies in 1834; an event which

Professor Rex Nettleford describes as ‘the greatest watershed

event in the history of this part of the Caribbean which millions

have come to call “home.”’5By this he means to say that the

Abolition of Slavery Law on August 1, 1834, by which Caribbean

society would have been emancipated from the ‘debilitating

transgressions of slavery’, had ‘made possible the emergence of

an entire set of rules governing conditions of work and industrial

relations, and safeguarding future society against the viler conse-

quences of the wanton exploitation of labour which had persisted

for two centuries before.’6We are then, the creatures of that Law;

not merely in some abstract sense of being the subjects of law’s

empire, but rather in some more organic sense of relatedness, in

that the abolition of slavery would have constituted the critical

starting point, or at least set the stage, for the development of a

new trend in colonial government in the West India colonies,

which, over a century later, culminated in political dependence

and the full restoration of civil status to all the inhabitants of this

Archipelago. For, with the abolition of slavery, and the granting

of civil status to those persons who lacked it prior to emancipa-

tion, the question of how these colonies were henceforth to be

governed became a central concern of British colonial policy.

Thus, for Professor Nettleford, the Emancipation Statute must

CARIBBEAN CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM

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be accorded canonic status as the foundation document of

modern Commonwealth Caribbean constitutionalism.

The historian D.J. Murray reminds us that in the late eigh-

teenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the current opinion

that the West India colonies formed the heart of the British

Empire. Among the colonies, they were the most prized. ‘Their

commercial worth and the contribution they made to the main-

tenance of British power is said to have led George III to regard

the West India colonies as a jewel in his Crown.’7In the opinion

of many who counted in British politics, the West India colonies

constituted the hub of Britain’s trading system. Clearly, Britain’s

fortunes were tied to the success of its West India colonies.8

In the early nineteenth century, however, though these colonies

were still regarded of major importance in Europe, they were less

and less regarded as an invaluable part of Britain’s trading system.

The Golden Age of the West Indies was fast coming to an end.9

They remained important largely because they continued to be

slave colonies. This, in consequence, made them the most time-

consuming and troublesome part of the Empire with which the

British Government and Parliament had to deal in the first third

of the nineteenth century.10

By that time, the institutions and procedures of colonial gov-

ernment would already have been established in these West India

colonies, which had been acquired by Great Britain between the

early part of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the

nineteenth, by settlement, conquest and exchange. The form of

colonial government found in the old West India colonies con-

formed broadly to the same pattern: it was the ‘old representative

system’ under which the power of initiative in colonial govern-

ment, in everything that related to internal affairs, was left mainly

with the colonists. This afforded the colonists the opportunity to

fashion their government as they saw fit, and in their interest. This

policy, by and large, dictated the outline and form of government

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Introduction