Evil Empire 31for its condition.” Manley displaced the Cold War’s East–West divide,
instead drawing on a longstanding anti-colonial critique to look at the
world along its North–South axis. When viewed from the “tropics,” the
world was not bifurcated by ideology, but by a global economy whose
origins lay in the project of European imperial expansion.
Imperialism, for Manley, was a form of not just political but economic
domination through which territories such as Jamaica were “geared to
produce not what was needed for themselves or for exchange for mutual
advantage, but rather... compelled to be the producers of what others
needed.” Between the 1940s and ’60s, the first generation of anti-co-
lonial nationalists, including Norman Manley, Michael’s father, had
largely liberated their countries from the political chains of empire by
securing independence. Anti-colonial nationalists aspired to use their
newfound sovereignty to transform the political and economic legacies
of imperialism. As a member of the second generation of postwar na-
tionalists, Manley viewed his election as an opportunity to realize this
aspiration for postcolonial transformation. Given “the condition of a
newly independent society encumbered with the economic, social and
psychological consequences of three hundred years of colonialism,” Man-
ley hoped his political program would secure “individual and collective
self-reliance” as well as political and economic equality. His platform
of democratic socialism for Jamaica inaugurated an ambitious project
of land redistribution, state control of key industries, stronger rights for
organized labor, worker ownership of industries, and the expansion of
health care and education.
However, this vision of postcolonial transformation was limited by
the very forms of dependence and inequality that it sought to overcome.
Because postcolonial states remained primary good exporters with na-
tional economies dependent on products such as bauxite, cocoa, coffee,
cotton, sisal, and tea, their domestic economic policies were subject to