British Guiana (now Guyana) has long been considered of peripheral concern to historians of Britain and has comprised a footnote, if that, in the history of the Cold War. Yet, in the first published scholarly monograph to examine the U.S. role in Guyanese politics in the 1950s and 1960s, Stephen Rabe suggests that such neglect has been shortsighted. Not only does Rabe's work fill a gap in the historiography of Guyana, but it provides invaluable insight into how American anti-Communism, by fostering an imperialist agenda overseas, directly affected Britain's decolonization policies and the future of her imperial subjects.

Rabe opens his study with an overview of Guyana from 1831, when it became a British colony, through the early 1950s. By this time, due to successive waves of migrant laborers drawn to the colony's sugar plantations, Guyana had become one of the most ethnically mixed regions in the Western Hemisphere. The colony's first major political party, the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP), reflected this multiethnicity. Founded in 1950, the PPP was led by Cheddi Jagan, of East Indian origin, his white North American wife, Janet Jagan, and Forbes Burnham, of African origin. The party won the colony's first democratic election in 1953 with a promise of unified socialist self-government.

Yet this unity was not to last. Less than six months after its election the PPP was ousted from power by British authorities, who were concerned about the Jagans’ Communist leanings. By the time elections were held again, in 1961, Burnham had broken with the Jagans and formed his own party, the People's National Party (PNP). In 1964 the PNP came to power with Burnham as prime minister. Election fraud ensured that he remained in power into the 1980s, dragging the country into a morass of racial violence, corruption, and economic decay.

Rabe argues that it was American interference in Guyanese politics that ensured Burnham's rule and thus Guyana's decline. This is not a new argument. As early as 1966, in his memoir, The West on Trial, Cheddi Jagan claimed extensive American involvement in his 1964 defeat. Yet Rabe is the first scholar to trace in detail the American policy of interference from the mid-1950s through the 1960s.

To do so Rabe considers not only perspectives from Washington (the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], and presidential administrations) and London (Colonial Office, Foreign Office, and the cabinet) but also the opinions of personnel on the ground, British, American, and Guyanese. Most important, he takes into account the very significant role of nongovernment players—particularly that of American, British, and Guyanese trade unions—in manipulating the situation in Guyana.

Rabe's wide research scope allows him to present a fascinating story. In 1957 the British had concluded that the Jagans, despite their socialism, could responsibly lead Guyana and thus allowed the PPP to reenter politics. The Eisenhower administration was, however, convinced that a PPP government would pose a serious threat to U.S. national security and accordingly took measures to weaken the party. Representatives of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations were sent to make contact with local Guyanese union officials, contacts through which they provided support (including lots of U.S. money) for Burnham. From the early 1960s, Kennedy himself also put intense pressure on the British government to back Burnham's political ambitions.

Thus, even in the absence of CIA records on Guyana (which have, interestingly, not survived), Rabe is able to show that the United States was a key player in weakening the PPP. On the ground, U.S.-backed union officials supported labor actions and political strategies that deliberately encouraged divisiveness and violence between ethnic Indians and Africans and destabilized the second popularly elected PPP government. Meanwhile, at the level of high diplomacy, intense pressure from Kennedy finally pushed the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, to put aside his concerns about Burnham's intentions. He agreed to an elaborate scheme to introduce proportional representation in the 1964 Guyana elections and thus ensure a Burnham victory.

Rabe's analysis of the fraught relationship between American and British leaders and his insight into Cheddi Jagan's attempts to forge a middle path between the United States and the Soviet Union reward careful reading. Yet it is his recounting of Kennedy and Johnson's cavalier attitude toward intelligence that catches the attention. Both presidents received reports from innumerable credible sources that Jagan was trustworthy and posed little threat to the United States, whereas Burnham was a racist opportunist who would likely betray his American supporters. Nevertheless, their desire for control over “America's backyard” and their anti-Communist ideology led the American administrations to ignore such insights in favor of a tragically simplistic “us” versus “them” approach to Guyana's election process.

In his concern to reveal America's culpability in Burnham's success, Rabe occasionally neglects the significance that local rivalries (e.g., the bad blood between Cheddi Jagan and Richard Ishmael, head of the pro-Burnham Manpower Citizens Association union) may have played in increasing divisiveness on the ground. Yet, his only serious weakness surfaces when he attempts to use race and gender analysis to understand the motives of policy makers. While he raises interesting questions about how ideas about Indian and African identity, as well as about white womanhood (particularly that of Janet Jagan), may have influenced the major players, Rabe is clearly uncomfortable with such analysis, and his conclusions are tentative and ultimately unsatisfying.

Notwithstanding this misstep, Rabe's study is a valuable contribution to our understanding of relations between American and British policy makers in the mid-twentieth century, as well as of the consequences of this relationship for British colonies. His “Cold War story” reminds us of how profoundly power politics have, at times, overwhelmed British and American devotion to liberty and human rights. By interfering in Guyana's politics both “great powers” not only denied Guyanese people their rights but, in doing so, set into motion a tragic cycle of violence and corruption that remains independent Guyana's most enduring legacy.