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Interesting question! As always in history, the short answer is: it's complicated. To start answering it, I should explain that the way in which we categorise different parts of the Caribbean is a bit problematic and reductionist. In the English-speaking west at least, we tend to look at the Caribbean as a largely homogenous region where the main differences between islands are of language. But terms like the 'British Caribbean' or 'British West Indies' are really just a geographical descriptor of convenience: it does not capture the intricacies or contours of the region's rich history, and it does not reflect any historic practice in how the region was administered by the British Empire. The truth is that this is a very heterogeneous part of the world - whilst there are definitely broad similarities between islands, each has its own unique and rich history.

Britain acquired its colonies in the Caribbean over an extended period of time, such that we can speak of three distinct waves of colonisation that produced three distinct types of colony. The first wave of colonisation coincided with the beginning of British settlement in Virginia and continental North America. Through the first half of the seventeenth century the British established a presence in places like Bermuda, Barbados, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, and the Bahamas; in 1655 Jamaica was acquired from the Spanish Empire by military force. These colonies were created or acquired with a settler-mindset - their settlement was about bringing England into the New World. Particularly in the larger islands the English established local governments with political arrangements that mirrored that of the motherland, having a part-elected, part-appointed legislature and a Governor to represent the authority of the Crown. These colonial governments inherited the principle of the primacy of the legislature on matters of supply, meaning that although the Governors had considerable power, local legislatures had ultimate power over all income and expenditure, giving considerable influence to local elites in the management of colonial affairs. In Jamaica and Barbados, they also developed elaborate systems of local government and judicial administration that mirrored those of the European metropole.

But not all of these islands were large enough in the eyes of the British colonisers to be considered as their own fully autonomous territories. Whilst they all retained local legislatures, in the 1670s the British introduced a quasi-federative structure to govern some of the smaller islands together. The British Leeward Islands - St. Kitts, Nevis, Barbuda, Anguilla, Antigua and Montserrat - were formed as a single colony under a centralised governor, initially with an administrative centre based in St Kitts. The next wave of British colonisation did not produce entities with quite the same degree of autonomy or independence. Islands like Dominica, Tobago or Grenada that came into British possession from the mid-eighteenth century onwards had their own representative legislatures but proved too small or too chaotic to govern effectively in the Jamaican model, with a complex multi-tiered structure of government. These new islands were largely grouped together into another federative colony, the British Windward Islands, with the exception of Dominica which joined the Leewards. Some of these islands fared better than others in terms of their development. Although the Bahamas was one of the first targets for English colonisation, it took the better part of a century and a half before it became a truly viable political entity; the Cayman Islands alternated between being a ward of the Bahamas, of Jamaica and being an independent colony with its own administration. Tobago was subject to constantly changing ownership by European powers that severely hindered its ability to develop an independent political tradition and government system (and this partly explains why today, despite being as populous as Saint Kitts or Dominica, it shares a government with Trinidad).

The final wave of colonies the British acquired at the turn of the eighteenth century had the least autonomy and independence. Although the British seized Trinidad by force from the Spanish in 1797, it and other possessions acquired in this period were administered in a model that we call Crown Colony government: a system where all functional power was vested in a local governor, with either no local legislature or a rubber-stamp body that had little power to challenge the Governor's (and thus - at least notionally - Britain's) authority. These were the states most different to places like Bermuda, Jamaica and Barbados, with their vibrant autonomous legislatures and long history of English-inspired 'democratic' politics. Although Trinidad was certainly large enough to support the development of a Jamaican-style, tiered political system, the British had little to no interest in encouraging one.

So the British Caribbean was not governed in a politically homogeneous fashion before the 20th century; we can talk of three broad and distinct styles of administration in the region that range from strong self-government to extreme imperial domination, and some individual islands experienced different styles of government before the mid-19th century that defy these broad patterns. At different points in the region's history the British experimented with more centralised and localised forms of power. The Leeward Islands federation was dissolved in 1816 for example in favour of two smaller administrative units with their own governors. In 1833 the British then moved in the opposite direction - the islands were reunified as a single entity with Barbados, until then its own colony, as the new centre of authority and power.

And this would be the trend through the 19th century. Contrary to the popular image of the British Empire entering into decline as we move towards the 20th century, the 1800s in the Caribbean is a period in which the imperial government is growing in its power. The abolition of slavery in the 1830s sent profound economic shockwaves through a region that was already becoming less and less significant to British imperial interests and the metropolitan economy. Although certainly still making a contribution to Britain's success as an imperial power, by the mid to late 19th century the attitude of the imperial government towards its Caribbean possessions was largely one of frustrated contempt. Tensions had always existed between the resident white elite of the region and the British - to the point where some of the former had at one point strongly considered following in American footsteps and declaring unilateral independence - but were generally strongest around the abolition of slavery and its aftermath.

The abolition of slavery had fundamentally transformed the social and political dynamics of the British Caribbean. Modeled on English ideas of what freedom and democracy should look like, Caribbean colonies did not generally have a legal 'colour bar' to exclude non-white people from participation in public life - instead participation in political life was largely determined on the basis of wealth, property and social class, not race (though the intersection between those things should be apparent). Whilst this did effectively exclude the vast majority of the newly-emancipated black population from participating in civic life and electoral politics in a meaningful, direct way, particularly in Jamaica a number of people of colour (particularly those with multiracial heritage) were able to break through the class barrier and qualify for the vote. Across the British Caribbean there was a developing, interracial mercantile middle class who objected to the domination of the traditional plantation-owning white elite.

At the same time, the new black working class were asserting their interests and fighting for their autonomy. White planters tried repeatedly to introduce new means of recreating some of the controls of the system of slavery (particularly through the judicial process - between 1833 and 1840 local spending on policing in Jamaica increased by an incredible 3,323%). Formerly enslaved people were resistant to wage labour, instead believing that the only guarantee of autonomy and freedom was to own your own land, and in colonies where unused land was in abundance, they fled the estates of the white plantocracy. White elites did their best to create unfavourable economic conditions for people of colour through land controls, cartelism, misleading contracts of employment, punitive taxation and outrageously high licensing fees for selling goods or operating transport. Although these measures were more successful in some colonies than others, the general trend in the region post-1838 was one of high civil and labour unrest. In Jamaica the emerging middle class became politically organised into a group we call the 'Town Party' - a loose alliance of white and mixed race middle class merchants, representing mostly urban constituencies in the local legislature. They were able to take advantage of the fact members of the white elite often had to abscond from the legislature for long periods of time to tend to their estates to challenge the authority of the plantation establishment, and at least some of these lawmakers had sympathies for the black working class (and more and more black people were starting to qualify for the vote, which had lower standards than qualification to stand for election).