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Book Description
This book is about Jock Campbell's role in the shaping of British Guiana (Guyana) towards the end of the empire. Campbell, the head of the Booker Company which owned most of the sugar plantations in colonial Guyana, was a reformer whose Fabian socialist beliefs drove him to secure major benefits for sugar workers, in the 1950s-60s. Clem Seecharan explores the fascinating interplay between Campbell's programme of reforms and the doctrinaire Marxism of Guyana's charismatic politician Cheddi Jagan. Fed by his notion of `bitter sugar' and an unrelenting hostility to Booker, Jagan exploited the loyalty of Indian sugar workers to foment instability on the plantations and thus undermined Campbell's mission to alleviate the colony's bitter plantation legacy. Seecharan provides a rigorous analysis of Campbell - a complex, progressive, contradictory and passionate man - and his work in turbulent British Guiana, marked by nationalist stirrings, mobilisation for decolonisation, the fragmenting of Jagan's nationalist coalition, and descent into racial hatred and violence. This is deftly handled in the context of the rise of Fidel Castro and Kennedy's Cold War obsessions. Sweetening `Bitter Sugar' is part biography, part history and politics. It also encompasses ethnicity, trade unionism, agricultural and technological innovation, and health, housing and social welfare reforms. It is an outstanding, elegantly written study in modern Caribbean historiography.
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