How did migration of political dissidents from the Caribbean during the Windrush era inform the founding of literary activist publications and the articulation of Black political thought in Britain?
10 February 2026Blog series Americas and Oceania
Author Jacob Feltham Forbes is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow based at Queen’s College, Oxford University.
As an Eccles Fellow, I researched the dispersal of anti-imperialist political thought from Britain’s Caribbean colonies to the British Isles during the Windrush era and, how it took shape in the form of numerous Black publishers in London.
The Windrush era commonly refers to the period between 1948 and 1962, when British migration policy facilitated the emigration of thousands of subjects from its Caribbean colonies to meet post-war labour shortages. Within this context, my research explores how, while the vast majority of incoming migrants arrived for predominantly economic purposes, amongst this migratory flow were a number of political dissidents whose radicalism in the colonies during the era of decolonisation informed their relocation to Britain. Upon arriving in Britain, a number of these figures opened independent publishers and bookshops in London and continued to express their radical politics through various forms of literary activism; their actions played an influential role on the growth and articulation of Black political thought in Britain. In fact, both of Britain’s pioneering independent Black publishers, New Beacon Books and Bogle L’Ouverture publications, were founded by anti-imperialists in exile from the Anglo-Caribbean: New Beacon was founded in 1966 by Trinidadian poet and trade unionist John La Rose alongside his business partner Sarah White, while Bogle L’Ouverture was founded in 1968 by two Guyanese anti-colonial nationalist party leaders, Jessica and Eric Huntley. These institutions, along with the texts and organisations which emerged from them, evidence the entangled intellectual histories of Caribbean anti-imperialism and Black political culture in post-war Britain.
The British Library’s holdings contain an extensive collection of materials connected to New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture as well as their founder’s pre-histories in the colonial Caribbean. Thus, the remainder of my blog signposts a handful of texts within the library’s holdings which reflect the anti-imperialist traditions which influenced the likes of John La Rose and the Huntley’s literary activism in post-war Britain.
Published by Guyanese political leader Cheddi Jagan, Forbidden Freedom (W49/7525) protests Britain’s 1953 intervention and dismissal of British Guiana’s first democratically elected party, the People’s Progressive Party. The text was written from first-hand experience as its author was leader of the party which, notably, Jessica and Eric Huntley were members of until they were forced to leave British Guiana during the late 50s. Forbidden Freedom describes the historic plight of the Guyanese people as a symptom of imperialist exploitation of the region’s resources, mediated historically by a White planter class and contemporarily by colonial rule. The electoral success of the People’s Progressive Party came with the party’s ability to promote a political coalition between Guyana’s Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean populations against the imperialist and white supremacist interests spelled out in texts like Forbidden Freedom. The text is an important articulation of Caribbean anti-imperialism and demonstrates how leaders like Jagan incorporated this critical reading of empire into their nationalist party politics.
Published by John La Rose in 1955, before he became a political exile and eventually emigrated to London in 1961, For More and Better Democracy (X.709/27824) offers a comparable intervention to Jagan’s Forbidden Freedom, produced in the anti-colonial nationalist context in Trinidad rather than British Guiana. In this short pamphlet, La Rose and fellow activist, Lennox Pierre, illustrate their vision of socialist democracy for post-colonial Trinidad. For More and Better Democracy represents one of the few examples of political writing published by New Beacon founder John La Rose before his emigration to Britain. The pamphlet evidences La Rose’s historic commitments to anti-imperialism while also hinting at his future vocation as a literary activist in London.
Foundations (X.908/10015) is a poetry collection published by John La Rose in 1966. It was the first publication of New Beacon Books and signals La Rose’s position at the centre of a burgeoning independent Black print culture in Britain. In Foundations La Rose reflects upon his memory of the Caribbean as well as his new diasporic conditions in Britain, emphasising experiences of racism and exile. The collection was published under La Rose’s middle name, Antony, to distance his poetry from his notoriety as a socialist political organiser in Trinidad. This detail speaks to how Foundations bridges La Rose’s experiences as an anti-colonial nationalist in the Caribbean and as a literary activist in Britain.
The Groundings with my Brothers (X.709/10382) is an infamous text, central to the Black Power era of the late sixties. Though it is composed of a series of lectures written and delivered by Guyanese historian Walter Rodney in Jamaica throughout the late sixties, it was published in London by Bogle L’Ouverture in 1969. Rodney brought the manuscript to London for publication by Eric and Jessica Huntley after he was banned from re-entering Jamaica by the government, owing to concerns surrounding his growing political influence and advocacy of Black Power politics. The publication of Groundings in London reflects the ways in which transnational literary activism was deployed to subvert the suppression of radical ideas by the post-colonial state. The publishing history of Groundings reflects how historic anti-imperialist networks were utilised in the cause of Black consciousness years after activists like the Huntleys left the Caribbean.
Read in dialogue, these four texts illustrate the historic connections between Caribbean anti-imperialist politics and the founding of the literary activist publications which influenced the development and articulation of Black political thought in Britain. While this blog has focussed on texts which reveal the transnational intellectual histories behind these publishers, it goes without saying that the radical politics which informed their founding was expressed domestically throughout the subsequent decades. Another article would be required to even scratch the surface of the histories of grassroot anti-racism, cultural intervention and political organisation which blossomed out from these institutions.
For interested readers, the British Library’s collections contain copies of the vast majority of the texts published by New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture. The catalogues of these publishers represent an invaluable record of the intellectual and political histories of Caribbean radicalism in Britain.
This blog is part of our Americas and Oceania blog series, promoting the work of our curators, recent acquisitions, digitisation projects, and collaborative projects outside the Library. Our blogs explore the British Library's extraordinarily diverse collections for the study of Americas and Oceania.
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