The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean

by Clive Thomas

Overview

Foreign interests have dominated the economic development of the Caribbean since the first arrival of Europeans in the region five centuries ago. From the plantation system and slavery to the exploitation of oil and bauxite by the multinational corporations, the history of the Caribbeau people is one of dependency and impoverishment. For the great majority, past and present- slaves, indentured laborers, p easants and workers, the unemployed- the region's subjection to extemal control has meant systematic hardship and social injustice. in this survey of economic development in the Caribbean, Clive Thomas traces the history of colonialism and neocolonialism from the perspective of this majority. Drawing lessons from numerous historical cases, Thomas argues that another form of development- by the poor and for the poor- is not only possible but necessary. The Poor and the Powerless offers a radical appraisal of the Caribbean's past vulnerability to foreign control and its future prospects for genuine independence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780906156353
Publisher:	Latin America Bureau
Publication date:	05/01/1988
Pages:	412
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Clive Thomas, a Guyanese economist, has been Director of the institute of Development Studies at the University of Guyana.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Conquest, Seulement and Slavery: The Makings of the Colonial Economy

Before the Europeans penetrated and conquered the Caribbean, early forms of communal subsistence, based on fishing, hunting and shifting agriculture, dominated the area's economy. At that time the region was relatively underpopulated, although through the use of Amerindian canoes, there was a certain amount of movement of persons and commodities between the various islands and territories. There was no developed sense of private property or of possessions outside the group or tribe when the Europeans moved in and transformed the Caribbean forever. This chapter briefly identifies the main forces shaping the Caribbean economy during the period of conquest, plunder and early settlement and during the subsequent period of consolidating slavery and the colonial plantation.

1: The Treasure of the Indies: Conquest, Plunder and Rivalry

As Gordon Lewis has aptly remarked, what passes for Caribbean recorded history comprises a remarkable admixture of legend, myth and distortion. From Columbus's so-called 'discoveries' to the 'earthly paradise' of today's tourist brochures, there has been a tendency to romanticise the area. But behind this romantic mask has always lain a brutal system of economic exploitation, both of the region and of the people associated with it. From its earliest recorded history, the Caribbean has witnessed some of the worst excesses of humankind: unrelieved plunder, genocide, slavery, indentured immigration and unspeakable barbarism. Thus, behind the myth of Columbus's 'genius and visionary character' lay an enterprise for commercial gain financed by the Spanish monarchs and their moneyed allies. As 'soldiers of fortune' the romantic conquistadores were actually promoting genocide and, as 'bearers of protestant liberty in the struggle against Catholic tyranny', the English buccaneers were really after a piece of the action – the slave trade and other people's territory.

The Caribbean was engulfed by the first wave of modern colonisation. Behind the voyages of exploration was a desire on the part of their financiers to find new sources of wealth to compensate for the traditional Mediterranean routes to the East having been disrupted by the Turks, the Crusades and the strategic domination of that area by the city-states of Venice and Genoa. The early emphasis was on plunder and trade, in other words on reaping the benefits of the accumulated treasures of native peoples, either through 'exchanges' or force of arms. There was, however, a built in limit to this system of simply appropriating the produce of others – the stock of wealth already possessed and the capacity of these groups to produce surpluses. With the low level technology prevailing among the Amerindian inhabitants, further extortion depended on the colonisers installing a system of production in the region. Since the contemporary economies of the region grew out of this early system, it is important to understand its character. Certain features of this period played an important part in determining how the Caribbean economy developed, of which the following nine have been selected for the purpose of this study:

(1) The confrontation between Europeans and the original Taino-Arawak-Carib Indians, which resulted in the latter being decimated and their simple communal economies marginalised. This, as it were, gave the Europeans a 'clean slate' for, unlike places such as India, they did not have to build on indestructible indigenous bases or preserve indigenous economic forms. As Sidney Mintz puts it:

The Caribbean colonies were not European imperial possessions erected upon massive indigenous bases in the area of declining great literate civilisations, as was true in India and Indonesia, they were not mere ports of trade, like Macao or Shanghai, where ancestral cultural hinterlands could remain surprisingly unaffected ... they were not 'tribal' mosaics, within which European colonizers carried on their exploitation ... they were in fact, the oldest 'industrial' colonies of the West outside Europe, manned entirely with introduced populations, and fitted to European needs with peculiar intensity and permissiveness.

The newly installed system of production was, from the outset, oriented almost exclusively towards serving the needs of European expansion and development. This ultimately became possible through killing off large numbers of indigenous people and destroying their culture.

(2) Because so many of the original people were killed off, production and development within the region had to depend almost exclusively on imported labour. This eventually resulted in a labour force composed predominantly of Europeans (recruited from the North and South), Africans and Asians. Initially, Europeans fleeing religious and political persecution in Europe were expected to make up the bulk of the work force, along with the surviving Amerindians, but it soon became obvious that the expanding business of producing and exporting tropical staples to Europe required other sources of labour as well. Here, the Portuguese exploration and conquest of the West African coastline, which had already begun as early as 1415, came in useful – the slave trade would provide a solution to the labour shortage. The combination of immigrant and enforced labour thus became one of the most distinctive features of the early Caribbean economy. This meant that although the actual processes of penetrating and developing the region were initially fuelled by the capitalist momentum in Europe (which later became mutually reinforcing as the Caribbean stimulated further capitalist development in Europe), the Caribbean was developing differently from Europe in one fundamental respect, namely in the character and organisation of its work force. This feature was later to assume immense significance in the evolution of the modern Caribbean economy.

(3) The Caribbean was not, and indeed could not have been, conquered and settled in one go. In some instances centuries elapsed before a colonial power was guaranteed effective possession of a territory against the ambitions of rival colonial powers, which contributed towards creating the sense of continuously moving frontiers. The Spaniards engaged in plunder and exchange or initially discovering the islands, but later reserved these areas to protect their sea lanes as they pushed the frontiers of their colonisation onto the mainland. Because new territory promised inexhaustible riches – the gains of conquest were held to be high – Caribbean ventures fostered intense rivalries and even wars among the European powers. All these factors played a part in determining the shape of the area's economy, but of most enduring importance has been that they produced an unevenness in the region's development. Variations in geographical position, size and resources, or even sheer accidents of history, would alone have ensured a certain amount of unevenness, but this was undoubtedly compounded by capitalism's proven tendency to develop unevenly through time and space.

(4) During the early periods of colonisation, the uncertainty of economic ventures in the region, along with the accompanying swings in the fortunes of the various territories, was further complicated by the high level of physical danger which characterised day-to-day life in the Caribbean until the end of the 17th century. The predatory activities of the buccaneeers, which continued throughout most of this period, made it impossible to consolidate any settled forms of economic life. Parry and Sherlock report that, during the six years of Morgan's ascendancy (1655-1661), as many as 18 cities, 4 towns and nearly 40 villages were sacked; several more than once. This estimate does not include English expeditions after 1670, nor French pillaging. It was not until the end of the 17th century that such activities were more or less brought under control and settled forms of economic enterprise allowed to flourish.

(5) The social cleavages inherent in forced labour and in a system in which different racial groups have unequal access to the society's wealth and power, combined with the shifting fortunes of the territories, destroyed any possibility there might have been of creating societies with common consensual values. Force, terror, fear, fraud and ideology therefore inevitably played a major role in shaping the character of the region. Authoritarianism was essential to those in control. To enforce it they systematically tried to ensure that the beliefs, values and ideas held by most of the population, rationalised and supported their continued subservience and dependence. They could not, however, entirely prevent oppressed groups from resisting their servitude. Local militias were set up and back-up colonial military forces used to cope with the almost constant round of insurrections and revolts.

(6) Early capitalism in Europe and the 16th and 17th century drives to create a world market would have been less successful had the aspirations of the European merchants and monarchs not been matched by developments in science and technology. The explorations of the West African coastline, the later crossing of the Atlantic and even the slave trade, only became possible because of improvements in nautical technology (maps, compasses, quadrants, ships, etc). To establish and sustain their domination, the Europeans were able to rely on a comparatively well developed armaments industry and systems of logistical support. Similarly, improvements in medical technology made it possible to transport millions of slaves under the inhumanly cramped conditions of a typical slave ship without losing too much of the cargo and crew to disease. Although the loss was still as high as three in ten on the journey and one third over a three-year period on the plantations, it would have been very much higher had it not been for advances in the medical sciences.

Having been central to the conquest of the region, European science and technology continued to play an important role in its subsequent development. For example, the fortunes of ports such as St Thomas (Virgin Islands) and Castries (St Lucia), which were built on the strategic geographical position of these islands for refuelling at the end of the Atlantic trade routes, were later lost when coal was replaced by oil. Similarly, the number of quick fortunes made in Barbados and the Bahamas diminished substantially when navigational and metereological advances reduced the number of shipwrecks. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, were the developments in the agricultural and animal sciences, which made it possible to produce sufficient indigenous plants and domestic animals to feed the growing populations and later to introduce new plants and animals into the region. As we shall see later on, the tendency to substitute indigenous plants and animals with imported varieties, had a marked effect on subsequent scientific and technological developments in the region. Thus, by the 16th century, sugar-cane (an import into the region) had become the most profitable agricultural crop and was being grown for export to Europe on plantations in Santo Domingo (in Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico and Jamaica (then a Spanish possession).

(7) Because the territories were all colonies of one or other imperial power, positions taken by the imperial state were important to the fortunes of the individual territories. The various imperial states sought to protect the interests of their own ruling classes in Europe and developed their colonies with this end in mind; they also implemented a number of devices, for example, Britain's infamous Navigation Acts in the 16th century, to ensure that they retained the benefits of colonisation for themselves. Intense rivalry developed over colonial possessions and this inevitably produced a remarkable succession of wars. Spain's initial monopoly was soon challenged by Portugal, and the Pope's attempts to arbitrate between these two colonising Catholic powers through a series of Papal Bulls had little real effect. Later, other lesser powers challenged both Spain and Portugal's claims in this region, but, despite these developments, the Spanish monopoly was still largely intact at the end of the 16th century, with the only fully settled colonies in the West Indies being Spanish. It therefore took more than a century before Spain's monopoly position began seriously to disintegrate.

Eventually, however, practically every European nation had fought for and controlled territory in the Caribbean, including such lesser powers as Denmark (which held the Virgin Islands until 1917) and Sweden (which held St Barthelemy until 1877), and the process of balkanisation was set in train. This tended to breed a rather insular outlook, which was reinforced by the imperial centre confining its sea routes (the most advanced form of communication at that time) to its own island possessions and thus discouraging the development of inter-territorial links in the area. The inter-island commerce and trade by canoes, which was practised by the original inhabitants of the area, was swept aside to meet the demands of European conquest and control. The continuous European rivalries and wars created a sense of insecurity among the local inhabitants who were never sure which power would be in control, for how long and what retributions would follow when a territory changed hands. Nevertheless, if only as a means of cementing ties with the mother country, each colonial power sought to import its own particular brand of European culture into its possessions. Hence the reference to Barbados as 'Little England', Martinique as the 'French Antillean jewel', and Cuba and Puerto Rico as the 'pride of Philip II of Spain'.

(8) While imperial powers fought to protect their own interests in the region, the new colonial states mediated these interests through local populations. Despite the apparent anarchy and lawlessness of the period of conquest and plunder, the colonising forces were quick to impose various governmental controls. Thus by the early 16th century, a rudimentary form of Spanish town government (the cabildo) had been set up in territories such as Jamaica (1509), Cuba (1511) and Puerto Rico (1512). What was striking about these territories at that time was how nakedly they promoted the interests of the imperial power and of the dominant local class of planters and colonists. This was ensured by denying the majority of the population any access to government; the colonial state thus played a vital role in shaping the characters of these societies. Conflicts arose later on when the local ruling classes tried to place their own interests over those of the imperial state. These sometimes led to open revolt and secession from Empire (as in the US) or at least fuelled the struggles for liberation from Europe (as in Spanish America as a whole).

(9) All these events took place during the commercial phase of capitalist development in Europe, when the emphasis was on market expansion, the simple exchange of commodities already produced and the seizure of treasure and surplus produce from others. In this phase the Caribbean provided an important source of primitive accumulation for the expansion and deepening of capitalist development in Europe. Profound changes were forced upon the New World: the decimation of the people and the destruction of their culture, the continued (if not systematic) loss of precious metals and tropical produce to Europe, the creation of white settler colonies (mainly in North America), the conversion of territory into trading posts and ports to facilitate European appropriation, and the growth of the slave trade and slavery. Although there is no doubt that external considerations took precedence in the development of the area, as local settlements were consolidated and local populations began to grow, internal factors began to assume more and more importance in the evolution of the territories. It is therefore a mistake to interpret the process as one-sided, for there was in fact a continuing and dynamic interaction between both external and internal factors. Highly complex internal forms of economic exploitation and domination have always existed in the region, but because of the fluid way in which they could respond to local conditions and the potent admixtures of class and non-class factors (especially race and religion) which have shaped the development of the region, these have sometimes been difficult to detect. The complex configuration of religious issues created in the region when the struggle between Catholic and Protestant factors were combined with that of the slaves trying to preserve their ancestral religious heritage, is one case in point. Similarly, the ideologies of racism, which were developed to justify the economic enterprise of capitalism and slavery in the Caribbean, became so deeply interwoven into the fabric of the society that they assumed a life of their own, often against the ruling group's best economic interests.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Map, x,
Preface, xiii,
Introduction, 1,
Part I: Roots, 9,
1 Conquest, Settlement and Slavery: The Makings of the Colonial Economy, 11,
2 Transition: From Colonial Slave Economy to Centre-Periphery Relations, 29,
3 Revolt and War: The Caribbean Around the Time of the Second World War, 45,
Part II: Independence and the Nationalist Alternatives, 57,
4 Colonialism and Nationalism: Alternative Economic Strategies, 59,
5 Puerto Rico to the Rescue: Industrialisation by Invitation, 75,
6 The Caribbean in Boom: Oil and Bauxite, 103,
7 Foreign Plantations, Peasants and the State: The Struggle for Land, 115,
8 The Search for New Poles of Growth: Tourism and Off-Shore Banking, 143,
9 The State and Institutional Reform, 173,
Part III: Crisis of the Nationalist Models and Social Experimentation, 183,
10 Social Structure, Ownership and Controls: The Basic Issues, 187,
11 National Experiments: The Radical Options, 209,
12 National Experiments: The Conservative Options, 267,
13 Small Countries in a Big World: Metropolitan Versus Caribbean Integration, 301,
14 Crisis, Reaction, Response: The Caribbean in the Late 1980s, 325,
15 Conclusion: Another Development, 351,
Notes, 371,
List of Acronyms, 376,
Bibliography, 379,
Index, 389,