West Indies: Political Parties and Pressure Groups Material

Material produced by the West Indian Federal Labour Party and the West Indies Group of University Teachers, 1958-1962, 1967. Most of these items date from the West Indies Federation period.

The British colonies in the Caribbean were united in the West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962; most of the members sought independence separately after the union collapsed.

Alphabetically by party or group, and then in rough chronological order.

Access to this collection is unrestricted for the purpose of private study and personal research within the supervised environment of the library. Access is free for anyone in higher education.

Item-level descriptions are available on the library catalogue: http://catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/search~S17/

Entry compiled by Sarah Drewery.

A photocopying and digitisation service is available, at the discretion of the Library staff. Copies are supplied solely for research or private study. Requests to publish, or to quote from original material should be submitted to the Information Resources Manager.

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.

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 and present it as a cohesive virtual collection. The project was successfully completed in July 2005. All of 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

See also Political Party, Trades Unions and Pressure Group Materials for Commonwealth countries and material in the Institute of Commonwealth Studies library's main classified sequence.