In the Barbadian capital, Bridgetown, a statue of Lord Horatio Nelson stands in Trafalgar Square, looking sternly towards the war memorial which honours those who died fighting for England. Nearby, the stained-glass windows of the House of Assembly feature a line of British monarchs from James I to Victoria. Beyond the capital Barbados looks to some like a tropical Dorset, full of rolling countryside and pretty parish churches. Coastal resorts have names like Hastings and Worthing; inland villages called Highgate and Clapham are redolent of London suburbia.

Nicknamed either affectionately or disparagingly ‘Little England’, this is the most British of the Commonwealth Caribbean islands. The tourism industry has taken up the theme with enthusiasm, promoting Barbados as a familiar haven of cricket and Yorkshire pudding.

The island’s Englishness is partly the result of almost 350 years of unbroken colonial rule. Alone of all the Caribbean islands, Barbados never changed hands in the inter-European rivalry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanks to its profitable sugar industry and strategic position, the British kept a tight grip on Barbados and have left their mark.

For most of the three decades after independence in 1966 Barbados has been something of a regional success story. A stable multi-party democracy, it developed a healthy economy, moving out of dependency on sugar and into tourism and manufacturing. Steady growth saw the island outstrip its neighbours, rivalling Greece or Portugal in per-capita income. The indicators are still impressive: health provision, education and housing are among the best in the Americas.

But recent developments have dented what many see as Barbadian complacency. The recession of the early 1990s battered the island’s tourism industry, revealing over-reliance on fickle European and North American markets. The derelict hotels and apartment blocks which line the south coast road are a grim reminder of tourism’s vagaries. Then the remnants of the sugar industry went into crisis, with low yields and under-investment blamed on droughts and poor management. The British multinational, Booker Tate, was brought in to revive the industry, but the results so far are uninspiring.

Now tourism has recovered somewhat, and the Government is keen to diversify further. Barbados has entered the offshore finance and services market, offering cheap data-processing and discreet bank accounts for tax-evaders. Manufacturing is growing, too, centred on garments and electronic parts for the US.

But renewed economic growth has not entirely dispelled the unease of the early 1990s. Critics of the conservative Barbados Labour Party claim that it tolerates a small white 閘ite, descended from the colonial planters, which wields disproportionate economic power.

There is also concern that a structural-adjustment programme, introduced at the behest of the IMF in 1992, is targeting public-sector workers and jeopardizing services.