Dominica: Political Parties Material

Platforms, manifestos and election leaflets issued by the Dominica Freedom Party, the Dominica Labour Party, the Dominica United People's Party and the LeBlanc Labour Party, from 1962.

Dominica passed between French and British hands several times in its colonial history and this, coupled with the early emergence of land-owning ex-slaves meant the island developed along different political lines to the big sugar colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica. By 1961 a Democratic Labour Party government had been elected, and it was this party which led Dominica first to associated statehood in 1967 and then to full independence eleven years later. 1980 saw the election of the Caribbean's first female prime minister, Eugenia Charles (Dominica Freedom Party), and although she had to survive coup attempts during her fifteen-year premiership subsequent peaceful transfers of power appeared to indicate that Dominica's political system was still functioning.

Alphabetically by party, and then in rough chronological order.

Open to all for research purposes; access is free for anyone in higher education.

Institute of Commonwealth Studies

The Political Archives Project was a 2.5 year project to catalogue political archive material held in the libraries of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas to the University and present it as a cohesive virtual collection. The project was successfully completed in July 2005. Descriptions of all the documents may be found by searching the library catalogue at http://catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/, or via the Political Archives website: http://polarch.sas.ac.uk

Records at item level on library catalogue (SASCAT).

Description compiled by Daniel Millum, Political Archives Project Officer at the Institutes of Commonwealth and Latin American Studies.

Copies can usually be obtained - apply to library staff.

The ICS political parties collection was begun in 1960-1961, with special emphasis being placed on primary material such as party constitutions, policy statements, convention reports and election manifestos. Since then, the main method of gathering material has been to appeal directly to political parties throughout the Commonwealth, though contributions from Institute members and staff following visits to relevant countries have been significant. More recently material has been collected by means of downloading documents from the websites of the major parties.

Further accruals are expected, some in electronic form.

See also Dominica: Trades Unions Material (TU.DQ), and Dominica: Pressure Groups Material (PG.DQ), as well as Political Party, Trades Unions and Pressure Group Materials for other Commonwealth countries and related material in the library's main classified sequence, all held at the ICS.