Verene Shepherd | How Britain underdeveloped the Caribbean

In this edition of Reparation Conversations, Verene Shepherd shares her reflections on Hilary Beckles’ new book, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean, which, along with his Britain’s Black Debt and Barbarity Times, expertly showcases the indecency of colonialism, the brutality of its implementers, the agency of its victims, the lingering legacies of colonial-era ideologies and the roadmap for redress.

 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of two influential books, George Beckford’s Persistent Poverty and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Now comes Hilary Beckles’ How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean, which not only cements the arguments raised in Beckford’s and Rodney’s path-breaking books, but uses newly released documents from British repositories to show that the awareness that a debt was owed to the Caribbean, for which a settlement was due, always existed among British government officials. A quote attributed to British MP, A. Creech-Jones, in 1939, provides evidentiary basis for that assertion:

“We carry a grave responsibility for a colonial policy based on cheap labour and cheap raw materials. The facts are out, and we can no longer plead ignorance and indifference. Of course, there has been official irresponsibility and the dominance of narrow calculating colonial interests. We can point to years of criminal neglect when official ineptitude and sloth have permitted affairs to drift and the islands to sink into unpardonable misery. Now a point has been reached when action is desperately urgent and British concern must be paid in hard cash. The hopeless squalor of today is in a real way the measure of the shortcomings of our colonial policy and of our economic neglect.”

KNEW ALL ALONG

This is an admission that Britain knew all along that greater significance should have been given to making amends, by way of reparation, for the debilitating colonial inheritance. The author then, being the tireless campaigner for reparatory justice that he is, naturally calls for the moving away from a language of aid to a language of debt owed:

“The call here is for a discursive return to the reparatory justice approach to economic development that provides an opportunity to transition from the aid-debt entrapment to an investment orientation. [The book] insists, as did Arthur Lewis in 1938–39, that the debt that Britain and Western countries whose economies have their basis in slavery owe the West Indies – for three centuries of native genocide, black chattel enslavement, Indian indentured servitude, and the overall crimes of colonisation – must be acknowledged, adjudicated and settled in a manner supportive of development. The liability on Britain’s side of the balance sheet must be converted into a performing asset on the West Indian side. This shift will enable the creation of a sustainable development framework ... This is an epistemic shift from the full-blown notion of West Indian development failure to a balanced and mediated explanation in which greater significance is given to making amends for the debilitating colonial inheritance.”

The book shows that the resentment over Africans’ “audacity” in fighting to end the slavery regime, goes far back, reflected in the ideas of post-slavery writers like Anthony Trollope (1858) and Thomas Carlyle (1853): “Anthony Trollope’s immediate plunge into Carlylian pro-slavery rhetoric represented the powerful prose-fiction extremism the Tory elite especially wanted to hear, and the squeamish liberals initially feared.” The “sugar estates in Jamaica”, he said, and “more than half of the coffee plantations have gone back into a state of bush” and the colony, “rich with the richest produce only thirty years ago ... has now fallen back into wilderness.”

ENDED SOURCE OF WEALTH EXTRACTION

Emancipation then ended one source of Britain’s wealth extraction. Allied to this were Trollope’s lament of black freedom, his idealisation of slavery and the chastisement of the British state for the undoing of the enslavers’ paradise:

“Jamaica was a land of wealth, rivalling the East in its means of riches, nay, excelling it as a market for capital, a place in which money might be turned; and that it now is a spot on the earth almost more poverty-stricken than any other ... That this change was brought about by the manumission of the slaves, which was completed in 1838, of that also the English world is generally aware.”

The book reminds us of the genealogy of the construction of a racist post-slavery Caribbean society BUT also that Caribbean people rejected its raison d’etre.

“The policy of the British government of reforming slavery while keeping intact its structures and relationship was rejected by West Indians as rooted in racist thinking and policies. The lobbies that continued to defend slavery as a modern model for the West Indies persisted in the use of military power to crush the emancipated. British parliamentary governance forced blacks to pay the dearest imaginable price. But they emerged with resilience and fortitude as the nineteenth-century carriers of the modern dispensation called democracy.” (p. 50)

The author also highlights the continued efforts to block true self-determination and starve the region economically:

“Britain understood that federation, democracy and independence meant the end of its empire in the West Indies. As a result, it took an aggressive posture against all calls for capital support to promote economic development ... Its strategy was to deny a debt was owed to the region” (p. 161)

The author is clear that when, on August 2, 1956, the British Parliament passed legislation to enable the formation of the British Caribbean Federation, it did so knowing that it had structured the governance model that assigned to the region responsibility for its neo-colonial economic development and financial sustainability. He argues that “The queen was fully endowed with executive powers vested in her by the Act. Her ability to exercise royal authority over the federation was administered through a Governor-General, intended to disempower Caribbean leadership. Britain had crafted a colonial federation at an anti-colonial time. It then proceeded to dispense with what it had created.” (p. 167)

Beckles’ epilogue is very much within the Beckford economic framework: “Poverty is the primary product of British rule. The enslaved, the indentured and their descendants were its systemic victims. The collective mass impoverishment is the underdevelopment of the region. Twentieth-century colonialism was the last harbinger of twenty-first-century persistent poverty. The perception of the West Indies as a place from which to extract profits produced an industrial relations culture that remains. Britain is invited to return to the scene of the crimes and to participate in a reparations-for-development programme.” (p. 217)

The book should be required reading for all those who doubt the callousness and brutality of British colonisers, the justification put forward for regional independence, and the support for a transition from monarchy to republic. The racism that African people still experience in the UK, including the treatment of the Windrush generation, the refusal to consider a reparation claim from CARICOM and the inequities that still characterise North-South relations can all be explained by the ideologies and attitudes laid down during the colonial period, in the case of Jamaica, during the 307 years of British and the over 160 years of Spanish presence in the island.

 

Send feedback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm