World War I shifted Caribbean trade dependence from Britain to the United States

Evidence

The war produced a price spiral for commodities and the British Caribbean, the commodity producer par excellence, tried to cash in on the boom as best they could. Some statistics for Jamaica reveal that, despite the effects by 1917/18 of the British blockade and the German submarine warfare on Allied trade, export values were maintained, even though there were falls in volumes, owing to the general spurt in prices for commodities, especially cocoa and coffee.” “While a factor in this was clearly sheer exploitative greed by the merchant categories in the colonial society, a more fundamental cause was the enforced shift of dependence for imports from Britain to the United States and to Canada as the blockade and the Battle of the Atlantic began to register themselves in the Caribbean… . The extraordinarily high percentage for imports from the United States [for Jamaica, 67.6 percent] clearly reflected some of the distortions effected by the war and which were still continuing into the post-war years. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2348

A more profound interpretation is provided by Fitz A. Baptiste: “The war produced a price spiral for commodities and the British Caribbean, the commodity producer par excellence, tried to cash in on the boom as best they could. Some statistics for Jamaica reveal that, despite the effects by 1917/18 of the British blockade and the German submarine warfare on Allied trade, export values were maintained, even though there were falls in volumes, owing to the general spurt in prices for commodities, especially cocoa and coffee.” “While a factor in this was clearly sheer exploitative greed by the merchant categories in the colonial society, a more fundamental cause was the enforced shift of dependence for imports from Britain to the United States and to Canada as the blockade and the Battle of the Atlantic began to register themselves in the Caribbean… . The extraordinarily high percentage for imports from the United States [for Jamaica, 67.6 percent] clearly reflected some of the distortions effected by the war and which were still continuing into the post-war years.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2348

Categorization

• XREF: The US replacing Britain as Caribbean economic patron during WWI is the kind of geopolitical-economic shift that matters for understanding when and why the radical tradition rose and was later contained.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2348