Creole nationalism reconsidered

I've been thinking lately about something that, on a world scale, is a pretty minor issue: How did decolonisation in the West Indies actually work? I've already written about how Eric Williams (shown at left) utilized Thomas Carlyle's Nigger Question as a justification for West Indian nationalism (along with some fascinating statistics about the use of soap in the mid-nineteenth century West Indies, a very Puritanical Catholic was our Eric).

I've also written, and will be presenting in April, on the role of Eric Williams and Norman Manley as political educators/theorists as well as political activists. Right now, I'm working on a paper (and, I hope, article) on C.L.R. James's The Case for West-Indian Self-Government.

All of this has led me to think about Creole nationalism. We can define this as the ideology shared by people like Manley and Williams, that saw the people of the West Indies as peoples capable of governing themselves. Creole nationalism has much in common with the nationalism of the Indian National Congress (particularly that of Nehru), but not that much with views like those of Kwame Nkrumah or Cheddi Jagan.

The question for me is this: What led to the failure of Creole nationalism? Or, in other words, why was it unable to overcome rival ideologies, such as black nationalism, even when it incorporated elements from them? That's a question which needs to be answered; at any rate none of the answers I've read so far seem satisfactory.

I may work on this on and off for the next couple of years. I'm beginning to suspect that a monograph is the only way to handle the question.