Cayman Islands and had reserve powers over the islands. Also, all laws passed by the Jamaica legislature specifically for the Cayman Islands had to be enforced. Otherwise the Cayman Islands had their own Administrator and Legislative Assembly. The final administrative link to Jamaica ceased upon Jamaica's independence in 1962 (although the Cayman Islands continued to use Jamaican currency for a further 10 years). The Turks and Caicos Islands had in 1848 broken their association with the Bahamas due to the insufficient means of communication between the islands and the government in Nassau (this was due to the lack of major shipping routes running in that direction). Being too small to have a separate administration, the islands requested to be placed under Jamaica due to the regular communication from Kingston to the islands along the Kingston to London shipping route. The British government agreed to this and from 1848 to 1873 the Turks and Caicos Islands were governed by superintendents/council presidents appointed from Jamaica. In 1873 the islands were then made into a dependency of Jamaica with a commissioner and a legislative board. In 1959, the islands were made more autonomous along the lines of the Cayman Islands with the Governor of Jamaica having reserve powers over the Turks and Caicos Islands. This relationship ceased when Jamaica obtained independence in 1962. West Indies Federation The West Indies Federation was a short-lived federation that existed from 3 January 1958 to 31 May 1962. It consisted of several Caribbean colonies of the United Kingdom. The expressed intention of the Federation was to create a political unit that would become independent from Britain as a single state—possibly similar to the Australian Federation, or Canadian Confederation; however, before that could happen, the Federation collapsed due to internal political conflicts. The Federation was an internally self-governing, federal state made up of ten provinces, all British colonial possessions. The federation was created by the United Kingdom in 1958 from most of the British West Indies. Britain intended that the Federation would shortly become a fully independent state, thus simultaneously satisfying the demands for independence from all the colonies in the region. However, the project was doomed by political squabbling among the provinces, and the Federation never achieved full sovereignty, either as a Commonwealth realm or as a republic within the Commonwealth. See also British colonization of the Americas English overseas possessions in the Wars of the Three