An examination of Creole nationalism in the British West Indies. It looks at how Anglophone Caribbean nationalist thinkers and activists reacted against British racist ideas and practices, inverting the hierarchies of nineteenth-century British imperial thought, as articulated by Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, and James Anthony Froude in their writings on the West Indies. First, JJ. Thomas, reacting to Froude's "West Indian fables" in the 1880s, then C.L.R. James in the early 1930s (as a liberal, rather than a Marxist), began the articulation of a specifically West Indian liberal nationalism. Then in the late 1930s, Norman Manley took the struggle more directly into the political arena. Finally, Eric Williams combined politics and scholarship from the 1930s to the 1980s as both historian and statesman. ( )