Hugh Shearer, who has died aged 81, governed Jamaica during a watershed period of Caribbean history. The heroic figures leading the island colonies to independence from Britain were uneasily confronting the new "black power" movement imported from the United States civil rights struggle, which challenged their authenticity and authority. The region's traditional plantation crops were giving way to a broader economic base of tourism and manufacturing, and this, too, disturbed the social order.
The humbly born Shearer began his career at 18 as an official with the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (Bitu), the country's biggest union and the industrial arm of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Both were dominated for 40 years by their tempestuous founder, Sir Alexander Bustamante, Jamaica's first prime minister, in whose shadow he toiled much of his life.
Shearer became an MP in 1955, but lost his seat four years later. When Bustamante became ill in 1964, he made Shearer unofficial head of the union and Donald Sangster the acting prime minister. At the 1967 election, won again by the JLP, Bustamante retired in favour of Sangster and handed over his parliamentary seat to Shearer, who became foreign minister.
When Sangster died six weeks later, Shearer was picked to succeed him as prime minister. He was faced with demands for greater economic and social justice, presented as black rights, then a touchy issue in Jamaica, where colour differences were sharper than elsewhere in the Anglo-Caribbean.
The spark was provided by Walter Rodney, a young Guyanese lecturer at the local University of the West Indies campus and apostle of the new movement. He urged students and poor Jamaicans to revolt against the country's colonial structures and raised the spectre of class war.
When Rodney went on a brief trip abroad in October 1968, Shearer refused to allow him back into the country. The several days of rioting and destruction that followed - known as the Rodney Riots - plus a ban on "black power" and socialist literature by the panicked ruling elite, became a rallying point for the region's burgeoning new left and for demands that Caribbean social problems be seriously tackled.
Shearer's Canute-like gesture undermined his authority, despite impressive economic growth figures and an extensive school-building programme. He was damaged, too, by over-identifying with Bustamante in efforts to establish himself. He also faced a charismatic rival in Michael Manley, leader of the opposi tion People's National Party who, though upper-class, adopted third-world, populist, regional, black power and Rastafarian themes, presenting himself as a more modern leader and pointing to the JLP as a tool of the brown and white elite and bastion of a bygone order.
The gentlemanly Shearer was also being shunted aside by a cabal of light-skinned ministers in his government and, after Manley's landslide victory in the 1972 general election, he came under attack from their leader, the US-born Lebanese-Jamaican Edward Seaga, who seized control of the JLP from him in 1974.
When Seaga, helped by covert US efforts to destabilise Manley's leftwing government, won the 1980 elections, he made it up to Shearer by naming him as token deputy prime minister and foreign minister with the brief of cutting ties with neighbouring Cuba and firmly aligning Jamaica with the US.
He was used as a deceptively gentle face of a government whose economic harshness and cold-war policies aped those of President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and shocked many in the region. When the JLP was beaten at the polls in 1989, Shearer returned to his lifelong work of running the Bitu.
He was twice married and leaves a son and two daughters.
· Hugh Shearer, politician and trade unionist, born May 18 1923; died July 5 2004.