| Summary: | <p>This thesis, based upon recently released British and American government documents, considers Anglo-American intervention in British Guiana in the years 1961-1964, when the American and British governments successfully engineered the removal from office of the democratically elected government of self-confessed marxist and alleged international communist, Cheddi Jagan.</p>
<p>The thesis examines the sources of the Kennedy administration's hostility to the Jagan government, locating its concerns in the demands of American domestic politics and in the perceived need to preserve the international credibility of the United States in the bipolar zero-sum context of the Cold War.</p>
<p>The administration realised its objectives in British Guiana through a multitrack process of intervention in the political, economic and industrial life of the colony and through sustained diplomatic pressure on the British government. The thesis investigates the instruments of intervention employed in Jagan's removal, highlighting particularly the role of the American and international trade union movements as agents of American foreign policy, and the political ramifications of American economic aid or non-aid for developing countries. It also examines the symbiotic relationship between Washington and leaders of British Guiana's political opposition who encouraged and facilitated intervention in the colony.</p>
<p>The thesis is more than a self-contained case study in the means and motives of intervention. It uses intervention in British Guiana as a base from which to approach broader Cold War, alliance and hemispheric issues. Placing events in the colony in the multiple contexts of the Cuban revolution, the globalisation of the American doctrine of 'containment', and the colony's volatile internal political situation, the thesis examines how an ostensibly peripheral country of little demonstrable interest to the United States became drawn into the Cold War. Finally, the thesis analyzes the conflicts over often bureaucratically defined policy preferences both within and between the British and American governments. In particular it demonstrates the distortion of British policy-making which resulted from the priority given to the preservation of the 'Special Relationship' with the United States.</p>
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