Sabine Clarke's monograph focuses on exploring the post-war visions of economic development for the British Caribbean colonies after the 1940s. This is an important intervention in a region that is often overlooked in historical studies, with historians tending to focus on Africa. Additionally, the work also shifts the point of analysis away from agriculture towards exploring the relationship between science and industry.

Science at the End of Empire seeks to explore the significant role that scientific research had on programmes of development across the Caribbean. It examines how ideas emerged and circulated at the metropolitan, regional and colonial level. The shift towards emphasizing the significance of the role of expert advisers in determining the direction of industrial development in the Caribbean is a crucial intervention the book makes. This allows the work to shift the debate about a singular colonial science towards multiple sciences that could function as part of the colonial state in various ways that determined various industrial and development projects. By adopting this approach, it sheds light on how ideas generated by elite researchers in colonial institutions were conveyed to technical staff in the field, therefore providing a nuanced understanding of the innate tension that existed between policy making and practice. The emphasis throughout its chapters is to move away from an investigation of the Colonial Office vision of Caribbean industrial development towards a focus on laboratory research and debates about the most appropriate plan for industrialization.

Chapter 1 explores the concerns the Colonial Office had in 1940 around the economic future of the British West Indies through the sugar cane industry. It is here that we see an exploration of widespread instances of rebellion to illustrate the agency of the subject population of the British West Indies as they seized the opportunity to protest against their growing grievances on issues such as wages, inadequate food and housing and the racism they experienced. It is argued that it was not these protests that would spur sugar companies or the Colonial Office to act. Instead, the onset of the Second World War, coupled with the need to find a new use for sugar cane, spurred scientific research into new industrial uses for this commodity.

Chapter 2 untangles the shift towards metropolitan committees becoming responsible for determining the future direction of colonial research, despite their having little or no direct experience of working in the tropics. By bringing colonial research closer into the remit of research institutions and universities in Britain it fundamentally altered the organization of colonial research. Here the work explores the tension between these metropolitan-based research committees and experts that were based in the colonies.

Chapter 3 focuses on the creation of the Caribbean Commission, which the work argues was supposed to coordinate policy for the Caribbean between the US and Britain, but in reality it operated as a vehicle that allowed the US to expand its influence in the region. This is a crucial part of the book, where it reveals the conflicts in visions for the industrialization of the region between Britain and the US. Alongside other initiatives such as President Truman's Point Four Programme, this is the moment when, Clarke suggests, power and influence in the region moves out of European imperial hands and into the hands of the US.

Chapter 4 explores the origins and significance of two new laboratories in Trinidad that undertook research in sugar chemistry and microbiology with the goal of encouraging a new chemical industry. Here the work identifies a distinction between experts in the Caribbean and in Africa. At the heart of Colonial Office policies was the preservation of freedom for the experts without the control and supervision that was present in the remaking of African societies. This comes across strongly in the exploration of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture's Department of Sugar Technology. After suffering from a lack of funding as a result of the Great Depression, the Colonial Development and Welfare funds revitalized the outputs of the institute and saw the opening of the Sugar Technology Laboratory (STL). Significantly, the research work carried out at the STL was under the complete control of its scientists with no input or pressure from either the metropole or the Trinidad legislature. The need to preserve and protect the freedom and autonomy of scientists in the colonies is a key aspect of the book's argument.

The fifth chapter seeks to reconsider the dominant narrative in the literature that it was W. Arthur Lewis's The Industrialisation of the British West Indies (1950) that determined industrial development in the Caribbean colonies in the long term. Instead, we see how in the post-war Caribbean there emerged several visions of industrial development that gave politicians in each of the Caribbean territories a choice to make as to which to pursue. This is an important contribution to our knowledge of the development of the Caribbean countries. This is achieved by exploring the diverging techniques adopted by different Caribbean colonies, which in the post-war period resulted in a less than uniform Caribbean political economy.

The final chapter explores the outcomes of schemes to foster new industry through scientific research into new uses for sugar. It is in this final chapter that the work unpacks the factors that led to the shift within the Colonial Office away from fundamental research and the freedoms that came with it. By the end of the 1940s the Colonial Office adopted a more critical approach to its handling of how it assessed research in terms of its usefulness. This reflected changes both within the colony and within Britain, where the use of creating an industry that used sugar as a raw material no longer seemed a realistic option. This led to development plans that considered a new future for the Caribbean as companies shifted towards oil.

Overall, this book makes a critical intervention into our understanding of how Britain pursued development in its Caribbean colonies. It shows that rather than a resistive policy there were several visions of industrial development that emerged during the 1940s. British reluctance to inject large capital into the Caribbean for the long term ultimately led to a less coherent programme of development than that which was advocated by the US. However, what remains unique to the British approach was the role the Colonial Office gave to scientific research. Science at the End of Empire does well to raise important questions about the role of state-funded scientific research in Britain's plan for industrial development and economic growth in its Caribbean colonies.