This companion volume to Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period, which covered the social and political forces between the 1920s and 1966 that shaped the trajectory of working-class struggles in Barbados and led to its decolonization, addresses mainly the first two decades of Barbados's independence as a sovereign monarchy under Errol Barrow and the Democratic Labour Party.

The contributors to Globalization, Sovereignty and Citizenship in the Caribbean variously address topics and issues of colonial and postcolonial citizenship, identity and belonging; sovereignty and the body politic and unresolved class and other contradictions of the Haitian Revolution, Commonwealth Caribbean societies, Cuba, and the non-independent territories of Puerto Rico and the Netherlands Antilles, the French Antilles, and the Cayman Islands. There are degrees of emphasis on the contradictory relationship between globalization and national processes, with attention to class, state, nation, gender, racialization, culture, migrant labour and other political concerns. Other topics include ways in which the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands influence conceptions of state security and governance and how cultural and ideological commitments to democracy and sovereignty reinforce certain sovereignty myths and contribute to the assertion that globalization represents a threat to sovereignty, democracy and freedom in the Caribbean. The deepening of the integration of the entire Caribbean into the contradictory processes of globalization suggests that sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, belonging and identity as experienced in the region are best theorized as unfinished (open-ended) projects.

Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a severe capitalist economic and financial crisis that intensified in the 1930s. The response in the British Caribbean during the 1930s was in the form of rebellions that demanded colonial reform. The ensuing struggles resulted in constitutional and political changes that led to decolonization and independence. In Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period, Hilbourne Watson examines the contradictory process through the lens of political economy and class analysis, informed by an internationalist historical perspective that centres the concerns and interests of the working class. Britain freed the colonies in ways that reflected its own subordination to US hegemony under the rubric of the Cold War, which served as the geopolitical strategy for liberal internationalism. Watson's analysis concentrates on the roles played by the labour movement, political parties, capitalist interests, and working-class and other popular organizations in Barbados and the British Caribbean, with support from Caribbean-American groups in New York that forged alliances with those black American organizations which saw their freedom struggles in an international context. Practically all the decolonizing (nationalist) elites in Barbados and other British Caribbean territories endorsed a British and American prescription for decolonization and self-government based on territorial primacy and at the expense of a strong West Indian federation that prioritized the working class. This move sidelined the working class and its interests also set back the struggle for self-determination, liberty and sovereignty. Watson situates the role Errol Barrow played in the transformation of Barbados in the wider Caribbean and international context. His study draws on archival records from Britain and Barbados, interviews and other sources, and he pays close attention to how the racialization of social life around nature, culture, history, the state, class, gender, politics, poverty and other factors conditioned the colonial experience.