DLDG - Week 7: Constitutional Durability and Constraint in the Longue Duree of Decolonisation in the Caribbean

In the Anglo Caribbean, decolonisation constitutions have been durable, and they track the longue duree of decolonisation in these small Caribbean states. We often think of decolonisation as a break-up and the end of empire. I think of decolonisation as a form of coloniality that generated new entanglements between the colonised and the coloniser. One of these is what I call dyadic constitutions, a form of plural constitutionalism in which the formal or large-C constitution references, is entangled with, and may owe its existence to an external constitution that is British and, in good measure, imperial. The modern grammar of these dyadic constitutions – they identify ‘the people’ and distinct political communities, they say who are citizens, secure fundamental rights, establish a form of democratic governance and treat the constitution as the fundamental law – obscures their colonial frame and imperial constraints.

In my talk with the Decolonising the Law Discussion Group (DLDG), I would like to reflect on two dimensions of the constraints that dominate the Anglo Caribbean’s durable dyadic constitutional terrain. The first is a legal constraint, that of the entrenchment of British institutions and colonial laws in Caribbean constitutions. The second is related, but of a different quality.  I want to think more about the mysteriousness of the constitutions –the opacity of their archive, how they were made, who made them and that they are ‘man-made’  – as a material constraint to generating new ways of making sense of them and moving beyond them.
 

• Erin F. Delaney, ‘Mapping Power: Constitutionalism and Its Colonial Legacy’ in Vicki C. Jackson and Madhav Khosla (eds), Redefining Comparative Constitutional Law (OUP 2025).
• Tracy Robinson, ‘Dyadic Caribbean Constitutions’ in Elisabeth Perham, Maartje De Visser, Rosalind Dixon (eds), Small State Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing forthcoming 2026) 31.
• Lauren Benton, and Adam Clulow, ‘Interpolity law and jurisdictional politics’ (2024) 42 Law and History Review 197.
  Martin Sybblis, ‘Corporate Law as Decolonization’ (2024) 71 UCLA L Rev 71 798.
• Phillip Dann, ‘Southern turn, Northern implications: rethinking the meaning of colonial legacies for Comparative Constitutional Studies’ (2023) 1 Comparative Constitutional Studies 174.
• Maggie Blackhawk, ‘Foreword: The Constitution of American Colonialism’ (2023)  137 Harv L Rev 137 1.
• Hakeem Yusuf and Tanzil Chowdhury, ‘The Persistence of Colonial Constitutionalism in British Overseas Territories’ (2019) 8 Global Constitutionalism 157.
• Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Duke University Press 2016).
• Tracy Robinson, ‘Gender, Nation and the Common Law Constitution’ (2008) 28 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 735.
• David Scott, ‘Introduction: on the archaeologies of black memory’ (2008) 12 small axe v.