ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by describing the significance attached to the Caribbean by the US during the Cold War in geopolitical terms. Accordingly, it is argued that the ideological significance of the region as a whole during this period came to outweigh the actual strategic importance of even the sum of individual Caribbean states. The chapter demonstrates how this perception largely shaped the conduct of US policy towards the region during this time as well as setting the political parameters inside which the policies of individual Caribbean states were necessarily conceived. It examines the impact of the so-called Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), which was launched by the US in 1982. The development experience of the Caribbean during the post-war period was not only shaped by its geographical proximity to the US, but, more fundamentally, by its peripheral location in the world economy that had been established during the first wave of European colonialism in the seventeenth century.
