How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparation Response to Europe's Legacy of Plunder and Poverty

by Hilary McD. Beckles

Overview

“The modern Caribbean economy was invented, structured and managed by European states for one purpose: to achieve maximum wealth extraction to fuel and sustain their national financial, commercial and industrial transformation.” So begins How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparation Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder and Poverty as Hilary McD. Beckles continues the groundbreaking work he began in Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide.

We are now in a time of global reckoning for centuries of crimes against humanity perpetrated by European colonial powers as they built their empires with the wealth extracted from the territories they occupied and exploited with enslaved and, later, indentured labour. The systematic brutality of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the plantation economies did not disappear with the abolition of slavery. Rather, the means of exploitation were reconfigured to ensure that wealth continued to flow to European states.

Independence from colonial powers in the twentieth century did not mean real freedom for the Caribbean nations, left as they were without the resources for meaningful development and in a state of persistent poverty. Beckles focuses his attention on the British Empire and shows how successive governments have systematically suppressed economic development in their former colonies and have refused to accept responsibility for the debt and development support they owe the Caribbean. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789766408695
Publisher:	The University of the West Indies Press
Publication date:	11/24/2021
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Hilary McD. Beckles is Professor of Economic and Social History and Vice-Chancellor, the University of the West Indies. His many publications include The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636–1876; Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide; A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market and Economy; Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados, 1636–1834; and Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Societies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements / ix

Prologue: Origins of Caribbean Underdevelopment / xi

Part 1.   British Emancipation as Wealth Extraction           

Introduction: Persistent Poverty: The British Legacy of Plunder / 3             

1. Roots of Poverty: Emancipation Business Model / 16  

2. “The Nigger Question”: Racial Terrorism / 26  

3. Black Bloodbaths: Dying for Democracy / 34   

Part 2.   British Fascism against Caribbean Freedom         

4. Freezing Freedom: Blocking Black Progress / 53             

5. Plantations Are Forever / 67  

6. Garvey’s Grassroots Guerrillas / 81     

7. Ending Empire: The 1930s Revolution / 102     

8. Arthur Lewis: Reparations for Economic Development /             120

Part 3.   Crushing Caribbean Aspirations

9. Federation without Funding: Empire Strikes Back / 137              

10. Punish West Indians, Promote East Indians: The Colombo Plan / 162 

11. Independence: Britain Exits on the Cheap / 183          

12. West Indian Nation-Building, or Cleaning up the Colonial Mess / 199 

Epilogue / 217

Selected Bibliography / 221

Illustration Credits / 233

Index / 237