As Published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review, Port of Spain, November 2005

Norman Girvan

I first met Lloyd Best in 1960 when he was a young economics researcher on the Mona Campus of the UWI and I, an economics undergraduate. Lloyd had a huge impact on a group of students that included Walter Rodney and Orlando Patterson and many others who went on to make a name for themselves in the social sciences, history, literature and politics. He was the intellectual leader of a discussion group called the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues that met every week at his house on College Common; the precursor of the New World Group that was formed by Lloyd and David DeCaires in Guyana in 1962. This group activity developed a series of critical analyses of the economics, politics and sociology of the colonial and emerging post-colonial order in the West Indies. ‘Industrialisation by Invitation’, the ‘theory of plantation economy’, ‘plantation society’ and ‘Doctor Politics’ were concepts which Lloyd originated that shaped the development of Caribbean social sciences in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. My own work on multinational corporations, dependency and regional integration owes a great deal to Lloyd’s influence and encouragement. Dozens of books, journal articles and pamphlets and radical publications including New World Quarterly and newspapers like Moko and Tapia in Trinidad and Abeng in Jamaica were among the offshoots of a powerful intellectual movement whose objective was the intellectual decolonisation and social and economic transformation of the Caribbean; a movement that had a significant impact on politics and government policies in the region.

Throughout his life Lloyd has been a ‘Great Conceptualiser’–a source of inspiration and of a constant flow of new ideas and of ways of seeing the world and the Caribbean reality that profoundly influenced the thinking of several generations of scholars and political activists. His robust and eloquent advocacy of a Pan-Caribbean cosmology that knows no linguistic boundaries and that is rooted in our own experience and aesthetic has evoked a sympathetic response from a people seeking to affirm its own unique identity and to forge a sense of regional nationhood out of what had been the forgotten outposts of an empire in decline. Above all, Lloyd has been an exemplar of the practice of critical, independent thought. In this sense his contribution is timeless; and the entire Caribbean nation will forever be in his debt.

October 22, 2005

It has been said that terrorism is the “the weapon of the weak”—an instrument that is used against an adversary with an overwhelming preponderance of conventional military power. If that is so, then security may be said to be “the preoccupation of the strong”—it reflects the need of the dominant power or powers to maintain the status quo. But both notions become more nuanced, for the concept of security is also used as a means of protection of the weak from the strong – the principle of security from the use and abuse of the arbitrary power of the state against the individual in the national sphere, for example; or security from the unilateral action of strong states against weaker states in contravention of international law.

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Prepared for the UNRISD Conference on the role of Social Knowledge in Development Policy Making, this paper argues the need for the South to secure greater policy autonomy and discusses factors involved in achieving this. In the 1950s the subdiscipline of development economics promoted policy autonomy by legitimizing the principle that their economies should be understood sui generis and providing justification for policies of national industrial and technological development. Southern institutions and the United Nations system supported a torrent of indigenous empirical research and theorizing in the developing world. The reversals of the 1980s disrupted the accumulation of policy experience in much of the South and squandered much of intellectual capital developed in the earlier period. Since the late 1990s global social movements, financial crises, contradictions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) process and the shifting political climate in the South have re-opened space for academic enquiry and policy experimentation. This process would be enriched by interrogation of the epistemic basis of the claims to universal applicability of neoclassical economics and the ethnocentricity that underlies it. It proposes acceptance of the ‘universality of diversity’ and recognition that responses to economic policy instruments are conditioned by political, social, cultural and institutional factors.

[Published as UNRISD Overarching Concerns, Programme Paper Number 9, October 2005 and in Peter Utting (ed.) Reclaiming Development Agendas: Knowledge, Power and International Policy Making. Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2006; ch. 4, 73-89.]

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Remarks at IFD Panel – International Forum on Development, New York, October 2005

In the Caribbean we have had various economic theories and strategies of development. In fact we could say that Caribbean society was created by a theory – the theory of Mercantilism in the 17th and 18th centuries – which gave rise to the Triangular Trade, including the African slave trade, the plantation system and slavery. The Ricardian theory of comparative advantage came later, in the 19th century, providing a retrospective justification for a pattern of specialisation in primary agricultural commodities that had developed in an earlier period. In the 1950s W. Arthur Lewis stood the Ricardian theory on its head by using it as the rationale for an industrialization strategy based on cheap labour, which replaced agricultural land as abundant factor and therefore as the source of comparative advantage. This was the development strategy of the 1950s and 1960s.

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Abstract. Examines differences and similarities in the approach to economic development of the Plantation School of Caribbean economists and of W.Arthur Lewis by locating them within their respective theoretical frameworks. By tracing the evolution of Lewis’s thinking from Caribbean industrialization to the ‘dual economy’ and then to trade and development, it argues that the focus of his later work brought him closer to ‘dependency’ explanations of underdevelopment, of which the Plantation School was one expression. Lewis’s perspective on the dependency thesis and the related thesis that imperialism is the cause underdevelopment is discussed. The paper goes on to review the Plantation School’s critiques of Lewis’s industrialization model for the Caribbean and its proposals for an alternative theoretical approach in the form of models of Plantation Economy, and compares this to Lewis’s analytical framework to show the differences and similarities. Finally, the paper discusses the contemporary relevance of the comparison of the approaches of Lewis and the Plantation School.

(From Social and Economic Studies, 54, 3; September 2005; 198-221).

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