The main goal of Oostindie and Klinkers’s Decolonising the Caribbean is to provide a comparative study of the several strands of postwar decolonization in the Caribbean: English, French, American, and Dutch. The book makes a special effort to bridge the gap between the study of Dutch decolonization in the former colonies of Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba, and that of the rest of the Caribbean. Suriname, here, is considered to be part of the Caribbean—a point made by several authors, both Dutch and Surinamese, over the past two decades.
Despite the book’s comparative outset, it deals mainly with the Dutch colonial territories. Oostindie and Klinkers are both specialists in the Dutch West Indies, and the emphasis on Dutch politics comes therefore quite naturally—the more so, since most of the primary sources come from Dutch government documents. This angle complements the better-known English, French, and American aspects of decolonization in...
