An Uneasy Microcosm: Incendiarism and Colonialism in the Turks and Caicos Islands, 1865–1986

This article explores challenges of scale for British imperial governance and criminal investigation through the lens of incendiary fires on the island of Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). TCI lies in the Lucayan Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean Sea. A British colony in the nineteenth century and a British Overseas Territory from the mid-twentieth century, local administrations in TCI have struggled to remain solvent, curry trust, and maintain order within a persistently imperial constitutional framework. The article is structured around two episodes in which suspicious fires prompted political officials to question the fortunes of liberal governance in the islands: a series of arsons in 1865; and the firing of a public building, Bascombe House, in 1985. There is no straight line to be drawn across one hundred and twenty years of colonial and postcolonial history. There are, nonetheless, striking similarities between the incendiary moments of the 1860s and the 1980s that show both changes in patterns of governance and resistance over time, and robust and enduring structures of secrecy and antagonism to the authority of a British government an ocean away.