Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: An Institutional and Historical Approach to Caribbean Economic Development

This important book provides a fascinating insight into the conceptual underpinnings of the theory of plantation economy, initiated by Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt in the 1960s, as a basis for analysing the nature of the Caribbean economy. While acknowledging an intellectual debt to Latin American structuralists Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Osvaldo Sunkel, and also to the work of Dudley Seers and William Demas, the authors develop an original and innovative analytical framework as a counter to more ‘universalist’ models which failed to take account of the Caribbean reality. Their work identifies the main features of the plantation economy as a hinterland characterised by subordination and dependency on the dominant metropole.

Distinguishing between hinterlands of conquest, settlement and exploitation, Best and Levitt analyse the rules that determine this complex relationship with the metropole. Their economic theories are presented against a background of the historical factors that gave rise to the ‘structural continuity’ of Caribbean economies and which now impede meaningful structural transformation.