3 - Industrialization

Summary

The virtual absence of any significant manufacturing activity was a feature of the British Caribbean colonies. Frank Wesley Pitman said of eighteenthcentury Barbadians that “apart from a few cotton hammocks, stockings, and horse nets, there were no manufactures to utilize their labor” (Pitman [1917] 1967, 4–5); and, by labor, Pitman meant the labor of former indentured white servants. The Commission said of Caribbean industries in the late 1930s that most of them belonged to one of the two following categories:(a) industries like electric power stations and gasworks, and printing works and ice factories that had to be situated in the localities where their products were consumed and (b) industries concerned with the “processing” of agricultural commodities that were produced locally (West India Royal Commission Report 1945, 15). It was not that the colonies were incapable of producing manufactures. Barbadians, for example, wanted to diversify their economy by promoting manufacturing activity (Pitman [1917] 1967, 4); but metropolitan economic doctrine was that the colonial economy was to be complementary to, and not competitive with, that of the metropole. Lord Chatham's remark that colonists should not be allowed to manufacture a nail or horseshoe highlighted the importance that Britain attached to this doctrine and to the ideology that Britain was to be the industrial center of the Empire and its colonies were to be its suppliers of raw materials. As late as the beginning of the second half of twentieth century some in Britain were still opposed to industrial development in the British colonies for fear that it would diminish the sale of British goods in colonial markets (Lewis 1949b, 27).

The stranglehold that colonial policy had on the development of manufacturing in the British Caribbean should not be underestimated. The Caribbean Commission—formerly the Anglo-American Commission—established in March 1942 found that the level of manufacturing in the region was low. Dominica was the only colony of the fruit-producing Windward Islands with a fruit-canning factory (Roskill 1951, 128); the manufacture of edible oils and soap made from copra, a product derived from coconut, was in a state of flux and it was recommended that careful consideration be given to the copra industry before deciding to establish additional factories to manufacture such products (Roskill 1951, 129).