uwi's 40th anniversary || st. lucia in the economic history of the windward islands: the 19th...

ST. LUCIA IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WINDWARD ISLANDS: THE 19TH CENTURYEXPERIENCEAuthor(s): W.K. MARSHALLSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, UWI's 40th ANNIVERSARY (SEPTEMBER, 1989),pp. 24-33Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653741 .

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ST. LUCIA IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WINDWARD ISLANDS: THE 19TH CENTURY EXPERIENCE

by

W.K. MARSHALL

Introduction First of all, let me confess that it is a little presumptuous of me to come to the home of our leading economic historian, Sir Arthur Lewis, to talk about economic history. I am not an economic historian; I am a bits-and-pieces historian who, without the benefit of training in economic theory and mathematics, has tried to comment on those social and economic trends that are not completely hidden from the conscientious layman. However, I am emboldened to continue that effort in St. Lucia tonight because Sir Arthur is thankfully absent; because, over the years, his own formidable gaze has been so fixed on loftier heights and on a wider panorama that room has been left for us lesser mortals; and because, in preparing this lecture, I discovered that, on the strength of a doctoral dissertation written nearly thirty years ago on the Windward Islands, I remain one of the few authorities on the economic history of St. Lucia.

That last comment should make us pause for a moment. Without attempting to get involved in the argument about the extent to which our present is a reflection of our past, we should be dismayed at the fact that large areas of our history remain un- explored or, if explored, the results of the explorations are relatively inaccessible. For me, attempting to assemble materials on the economic performance of St. Lucia in the 19th century, this gap in our historical literature was a particular problem. To do the job properly, I needed access to information on national income, on the patterns of production and of external trade, on the performance of the plantation and peasant sectors, on productivity, on social conditions (personal consumption, public health, employment opportunities, etc.), on public finance. In other words, I needed to consult studies like the one Gisela Eisner did on Jamaica for the period 1830 to 1930; or, at a less technical level, I could have used a version of Walter Rodney's History of the Guyanese Working People or Douglas Hall's Five of the Leewards (1834-1870). But what was I left to consult? Apart from my own dissertation and that of your own Michael Louis, there was the work of the nineteenth century historians and tourist/commentators which mainly yielded partial, limited and often misleading information. This information was amplified to some extent by the sound but outline histories of Father Jesse and B.H. Easter and, particularly, by the report of the 1897 West Indian Royal Commission. But all this does not amount to a substantial base for either a general or a detailed examination of the historical experience of St. Lucia.



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It seems to me that something deliberate should be done to remedy this situation. I have great admiration and support for the local history effort, and throughout the Caribbean we have been most fortunate to have individuals of the quality and energy of Father Jesse, B.H. Easter, Robert Devaux, Harold Simmons and Father Anthony, without whom there would often be no popular history available; but the effort of the most enthusiastic part-timer cannot produce the body of literature that is required. Similarly, the supply from the graduate school mills of North America, Britain and even U.W.I, is unpredictable in supply, uneven in quality, and will reflect more the prevailing fads in research topics than be designed to fill perceived gaps in the literature. Moreover, even when good or useful work is produced in these dissertations, it may, as in the case of Michael Louis' excellant study of the St. Lucia peasantry, remain buried in university libraries. So, perhaps the time has come to complètent the voluntary effort and private enterprise by the commissioning of historical studies. What I envisage is that Ministries of Education and Culture should attempt to establish a partnership with the historians of the University of the West Indies 'in the production of a range of historical material. The government departments would identify the areas to be covered, would provide a measure of research assistance and share the costs of publication; and the Departments of History would define the topics, organize and execute the research, and produce manuscripts for publication. Hopefully, then, by the time you celebrate your 15th anniversary, there will be little need to apologize for the quality of a lecture on the history of St. Lucia.

The Structure of the Discussion Lest I be accused of exploiting a largely captive audience for the benefit of myself

and my colleagues, let me hastily return to tonight's main business. I propose first an overview of the St. Lucian economic performance which will feature the occasional comments made on it by visitors as well as the basis for whatever ranking in economic performance St. Lucia occupied during the 19th century. Next, I will consider the extent to which there was growth and change in the economy. Finally, I will consider the probable role of the factors which may have constrained economic growth and change.

The Overview From the perspective of nineteenth century visitors and commentators, St. Lucia

was an undeveloped island which, however, possessed potential for significant agricultural expansion. Early visitors like Trelawny Wentworth and Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey thought it "an unfortunate island", "an unoccupied wilderness", a "neglected" island ranking in "the lowest scale among these islands". These themes of neglect and limited settlement were echoed by the later commentators. Henry Breen lamented that only one-sixteenth of the island was cultivated though it was cultivable "to the summits of its highest mountains"; and John Davy linked its limited cultivation with "sparse population". The influential Royal Commissioners declared in 1897 that "only a small portion of the total cultivable area is actually under cultivation" and that, apart from the cultivation of sugar cane and possibly cocoa, "the agricultural development of St. Lucia has hardly begun". The only commentator who was not impressed by lack of development was William Sewell who came to the region in the late 1850s. He wrote approvingly



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about the planters' 'wise policy' in adopting share-cropping which had created "an independent class of labourers" and had ensured that the free labour experiment was an "undoubted success". However, this commendation is put in full perspective when we hear from him that St. Lucia is one of the smallest islands, containing 37,000 acres! He was clearly confusing it with some other place, and obviously did not visit it. His comments should perhaps be ignored.

How does this generally pessimistic assessment stack up against what we think we know about the situation? In the first place, settlement was not extensive, if judged in terms of population density. For the first three decades of the century, St. Lucia had a population of about 18,000 with a slave population density of between 57 and 60 which was almost as low as Dominica's 46, which itself was the lowest in the Windward Islands. However, population growth was marked after slave emancipation: by 1851, 24,318; by 1861, 31,600; by 1891, 42,220. By the end of the century, density was 197 which was more than twice that of Dominica. But, more to the point, in terms of total size St. Lucia's population now ranked second to Grenada's when, at the start of the century, it had been fourth, only ahead of Tobago's.

But we must also consider the cultivable extent and the carrying capacity of the land. If, like Breen and the Royal Commission, we use unscientific observation as our guide, then at least 75% of the surface is cultivable; but if we adopt geographers' criteria of soil type, degree of slope and susceptibility to erosion, we could conclude that the cultivable area is only about half of the island's surface. This significant variation in estimates means that we must be cautious in our conclusions about real population density, about the limited extent of settlement and about the capacity of the island's soil to sustain a much larger population, even in the nineteenth century. In any case, despite the extravagant claims of the island's capacity to carry much larger population that were being heard up until the 1890s, the fact that, by the end of the century, there was significant out-migration suggests that the extent of underpopulation was being continuously overstated.

The other main point to be considered is size and character of agricultural output. What is clearly apparent here is that, in the early years of the century, St. Lucia seems to be producing far below its potential, particularly if compared with some of its neighbours. The value and quantity of the staples of sugar, coffee, cocoa and cotton would have placed St. Lucia behind Grenada, St. Vincent and Tobago, and probably on par with Dominica. It is therefore possible to sustain a case for neglect, or for under-exploitation of agricultural resources. But there are some explanations of agricultural resources. As Breen and others have pointed out, St. Lucia's incorporation into the dominant plantation system was obstructed during the late 18th century by the imperial conflicts of France and England, was brought to an abrupt halt by the circumstances of what Acosta and Casimir call "the first slave emancipation" in St. Lucia - that is, the attempt by St. Lucian slaves to localize the principles of the French Revolution. The resulting civil war meant that plantation enterprise was paralysed for nearly a decade. Finally, St. Lucia began its tranquil period of political and economic existence just when the slave trade was abolished and so could not benefit from a substantial labour inflow from



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Africa. So, this was not a case of deliberate neglect, merely the unfortunate consequence of a conjuncture of events.

This point is borne out to some extent by the nature of St. Lucia's economic performance throughout the rest of the century. Despite the unpromising start, despite massive indebtedness which caused a wholesale change of ownership in the sugar industry by the 1830s, and despite the weakness and uncertainties in the export markets for sugar, cocoa, logwood, satin wood, the plantation-based economy grew at a significant rate, much faster than its neighbours, to the extent that, by the end of the century, only the Grenada economy could be said to be larger. Let me illustrate these points.

Growth in the Plantation Economy The obvious example is the sugar industry, which was the mainstay of all economic

activity in these islands until the 1870s. In 1815, sugar shared prominence in the St. Lucia export list with coffee, cotton and cocoa (in that order), but, by 1831, a monocultural tendency was apparent. Cocoa was stagnant, coffee was dwindling and cotton had disappeared. Both cocoa and cotton showed signs of revival in the 1850s, but while cotton's was short-lived, cocoa steadily advanced to become a second major staple by 1880, exceeding a million pounds in export quantity by 1896. But sugar's dominance, in terms of land use, state support and share of the value of exports, remained unchallenged until the dark days of the Beet Sugar crisis. Sugar exports reached nearly 4,000 tons by 1814, remained fairly steady until 1830, fluctuated between 2,500 and 3,500 tons in 1831-50, and then advanced gradually to over 8,000 tons by 1884 when depression dropped output to an average of about 4,500 tons for the rest of the century. By the 1880s, it represented over 80% of value of exports, and even in the depth of the depression it represented about 40%. This performance contrasts sharply with the neighbours'. St. Vincent's output after 1834 never reached its pre-emancipation level of about 11,000 tons, and the industry, though managing an output of 9,042 tons in 1884, was virtually wiped out by the end of the century. Grenada's output gradually fell from its high point of over 13,000 tons in 1828, a fall that was accelerated in the 1870s as Grenada became a cocoa island. By 1880, the industry had virtually disappeared. Tobago struggled from the 1830s to maintain production levels of 2,500 - 3,000 tons; and Dominica never succeeded in reaching the 4,000 ton mark. On this evidence, St. Lucia easily had the strongest sugar industry and probably the strongest plantation economy in the last half of the century.

Size of Economy My use of the term, "size of economy", is crude. I do not mean national income or

gross domestic product, because I have no means of computing this; rather I mean the size of export trade, which, hopefully, is a useful index to the size of economy. By that criterion, the St. Lucian economy, powered by sugar's performance and by cocoa's revival and with occasional substantial assistance from logwood, had overtaken St. Vincent's in the 1870s, was competitive with Grenada's before the sugar depression struck in 1883-4, and was in second place behind Grenada's in 1895. In that year, which was a particularly bad one for sugar and cocoa prices, the relative outputs were: Grenada, £172,020; St. Lucia, £137,869; St. Vincent, £65,914; Dominica, £37,132. Depressed



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sugar prices clearly had an impact on this comparative performance. The value of St. Vincent's exports had dropped by almost 60% between 1878 and 1895, St. Lucia's by about 35%, but Grenada's by only 13%. In other words, the trends that manifested themselves in the 1860s and 1870s, if continued, could have placed St. Lucia in the top spot by the end of the century.

The Ranking Based on the crude indicators of population size and value of exports, the ranking

is obvious. St. Lucia had moved from the lowest ranks at the start of the century to virtually the top ranks by the late 1870s or early 1880s. And even if we add another crude indicator, public revenue, the situation is not altered. With basically similar fiscal policies, St. Lucia equalled St. Vincent's public revenue by the late 1870s and was even with Grenada's by 1890-5.

However, the ranking might be affected and the judgement on the quality of economic performance might have to be qualified if we could confidently extend our criteria of assessment to include other inputs in national income, notably the contribu- tion of the non-plantation agricultural sector. We do not have the full data, but some indications can be gleaned from a survey of the components of the export trade of Grenada, Dominica and St. Lucia. In both Grenada and Dominica, we find substantial evidence of diversified production: from Grenada, cocoa, sugar, cotton, spices, livestock, fruit and vegetables, firewood, with the minor cash crops accounting for about 20% of total earnings; from Dominica, sugar, limes and lime juice, cocoa, fruit and vegetables, arrowroot, logwood, firewood, with the minor staples clearly becoming the economic mainstay by 1890. When we add the information that Grenada and Dominica apparently possessed much larger peasantries than St. Lucia, we have a clear indication of the existence of substantial non-plantation production featuring cash crops as well as food for local consumption. There is a second indication as well: metropolitan markets are a main focus of production, but some attention is being paid to production for regional or sub-regional markets, which in turn is clearly illustrated by Grenada's leading partici- pation in intra-regional trade in livestock, fruit and vegetables.

The St. Lucían pattern of production is somewhat different. There are elements of diversification represented by cocoa, firewood, wood products (hoe sticks, spokes), and logwood in the export lists. But closer examination indicate a much less pronounced trend towards diversification. Only cocoa and logwood are significant minor cash crops; cocoa is mainly a plantation crop by the end of the century; logwood is the only significant peasant product in the export lists; and the number of small holdings is much less than Grenada's. Therefore, in the ability both to provide food for home consumption and to cope with dislocation in main export markets, there is a marked qualitative difference between the Grenada economy and St. Lucia's. By these revised indicators, then, St. Lucia's economic performance over the 19th century was way behind Grenada's and hardly better than Dominica's.

Role of Sugar and the Plantation We can partly account for this qualitative difference in the performance between



30

the Grenadian and St. Lucian economies by focusing on the factors in the significant growth of the St. Lucian sugar industry in the period 1842-1883. The first factor which I would identify is the accident of late development. By that I mean that St. Lucia's resources for agricultural development had only been scratched before the start of the century. Sustained exploitation came later than it did in St. Vincent, Dominica or Tobago; and St. Lucia possessed larger land reserves to sustain that exploitation. Further, quanti- ties of fertile land ensured higher yields and, for that reason, may have attracted the attention of British investors in much the same way that the new frontier for sugar expansion in Trinidad and Guyana attracted such capitalist attention.

The second factor was the effect of the administrative reforms instituted by John Jeremie between 1825 and 1833. The creation of a modern mortgage office and an effective mechanism for facilitating the transfer of encumbered property (saisie réelle) rationalized credit arrangements and made possible the emergence of a new proprietary class largely unfettered by debt. Therefore, relatively speaking, St. Lucia may have had a fairly enterprising planter class after the 1830s, one that had access to credit and one that may have been less opposed than its counterparts to change in technology or labour use. The most striking illustration of this openness to change is, of course, the establishment of share-cropping or Métairie in the 1840s and 1850s. This was never intended as any permanent part of the plantation labour and production arrangements but was seen as a necessary means of coping with credit and labour shortages that had been provoked by a fall in sugar prices and profits. But, though the adoption had the features of ex- pediency, it is to the planters' credit that they were prepared to experiment, to depart from the traditional, if only for a limited period; and, in so doing, saved themselves and the industry for its better days in the 1860s and 1870s.

The third factor was enduring political supports for the plantation and the sugar industry. Crown Colony government in St. Lucia and the Colonial Office in London (though often not Governors-in-Chief at Barbados) seemed to share the planters' belief that the plantation was the appropriate mechanism for exploiting the island's splendid resources and that sugar cane was the only viable crop. Therefore, the sugar planters gained, with perhaps less effort than their colleagues in other islands, official support for legislation to create a dependent labour force and for state subsidies towards their production costs. The clear illustrations of official attempts to manipulate the labour market are seen in legislation against squatting, regulations to restrict the alienation of Crown Land (which remained until the late 1870s) and the Cultivated Land Tax which provoked the famous riots of 1849. State subsidies of production costs were furnished through immigration schemes, partly financed by taxation of peasant produce, which brought in about 6,000 additional labourers from Africa, India and Barbados. The most impressive subsidy, however, was the government investment of £40,000 in the Construction of the first Central Factory, the Cul de Sac Factory, in 1874-5. This investment may be better described as a gift to the industry, for the government lost its entire investment when the failing company was sold off at a loss.

Several points emerge from this last episode. First is the evident interest in techno- logical innovation which both government and planter recognized as the only means to save the sugar industry from creeping Beet Sugar competition in an open British market.



31

Such an interest led to the creation of two other centrals by the 1880s. Second, this development illustrates clearly the difference between the St. Lucia Sugar industry and its neighbours'. No centrals were established in the other Windward Islands before the end of the century. Third, this government/planter solidarity underscored a commitment to sugar monoculture, if not to total plantation-based economic activity. By the last quarter of the century, it could be argued that the peasant option was being officially recognized, but this was being done on very special terms. As Michael Louis has argued, partly to stimulate labourers' consumption of imported goods, partly to create a buffer between the underclasses and the elite in the event of new riots, but mainly to provide a cheap source of canes for the projected central factories, the official prohibition on the alienation of Crown Lands in small lots was eased in 1878. This was not support for the peasant option; it was an attempt to buy cheap labour by incorporating a new peasantry into the dominant plantation-based enterprise.

Constraints on Economic Growth and Change By the end of the century, even by the late 1870s, it was evident that the St. Lucian

economy, despite its increased size and a rate of growth much faster than most of its neighbours', was, like the others, proving even less capable than before of providing an adequate amount of goods and services for the consumption of its people. Rising unemployment, falling wage levels, depressed living standards, falling property values and estate abandonment, increasing out-migration flashed familiar signals of recurring economic depression. But the major difference between this depression and previous ones was its severity and duration which, predictably, forced consideration, for the first time in the Caribbean, of structural change in the economy. The question arises, therefore, whether there were constraints on the performance of the Economy which may have been responsible for this crisis situation.

We have already suggested that population shortage, in a general sense, was hardly an important constraint because there may have been gross overstatement of the island's capacity to absorb additional population. But the advocates of continuing immigration were not concerned about the need for human resources to extend settlement and agri- culture; they were anxious to procure a cheap labour force for the sugar industry. They promoted immigration as a means of over-stocking the labour market and of reducing opportunities for alternative employment. They hoped to create a Barbados-type labour situation by using the means that had worked brilliantly in Guyana and Trinidad. But the experience with immigration made their hopes illusory. Neither their own pockets nor the government's revenues could bear the costs of the substantial immigration that was required to produce the result they wanted. Nor could they even hold on either to the immigrants they received or to their own Creole labourers. St. Lucia, like the other Windward Islands, was often a conduit for the delivery of immigrants and native labourers to other Caribbean territories which offered higher wages. Therefore, as Governor-in-Chief Hincks had suggested in the 1850s, St. Lucian planters needed to devise means of holding on to their own labourers rather than to depend on immigration as a panacea. The point is that cheaper labour would have improved the prospects of plantation economic activity by reducing production costs, but, from the start of mass indentured immigration in the 1840s, large, cheap labour supplies had been unavailable to St. Lucia, and so valuable time,



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energy and resources were wasted in the pursuit of a shadow.

Similarly, too much stress cannot be placed on the lack of capital investment. Investment is attracted by the prospect of profit, and the sugar industry, from the 1840s and probably earlier, was seen as a high risk/low yield area. But, on the other hand, it is clear that the planters had access to some credit mainly because of their relatively low levels of accumulated debt; and, with government blessing and backing, they managed in the 1870s and 1880s to attract some foreign capital for investment in central factories. Therefore, the situation was not unpromising throughout the period. The real problem was whether additional investment in traditional economic activity could have ensured continuing economic growth.

A third factor, international economic pressures, could be shown to have impacted strongly on the local economy. This was seen most clearly in the sugar depression after 1884. Basically, British abolition of sugar duties fully opened the British market to the dumping of subsidized European beet sugar; this caused a crash in prices, which, in turn, forced British Caribbean suppliers to scurry around to find alternative markets; but, as could be expected, expanding world supplies of beet and cane sugar rendered most markets soft and unprofitable. All these, in turn, meant that losses accumulated, export earnings dwindled and traditional credit and trading arrangements collapsed. For St. Lucia, like all countries heavily dependent on the production of the sugar staple, these events produced severe dislocation. In other words, to the extent that these economies were integrated into the international economy, abrupt changes in the functioning of that economy could be held responsible, in a general way, for the nature and timing of the repercussions on the tributary or peripheral economies. But the international economy could not be held wholly or mainly responsible for those characteristics of the local economies which made them particularly susceptible to dislocation and even to destruction. Such characteristics included the inefficiency and relatively high cost of production in the St. Lucian sugar industry, the persistent monocultural emphasis, the dominant plantation, and the active discouragement of the peasant sector.

Together, these characteristics ensured that the St. Lucian economy, like St. Vincent's or Tobago's, did not possess to any degree those elements of resilience and self-sufficiency which might have enabled it to cope with severe commercial crisis and with the spectre of widespread starvation. There is of course no certainty in these matters - but the Grenada experience suggested that, even with a fall in cocoa prices, there would have been no appreciable loss in goods and services. Such an option had been clearly available to St. Lucia at slave emancipation. The same patterns of slave maintenance and internal marketing which propelled the establishment of a peasantry in Grenada and Dominica were present in St. Lucia. Land for smallhold settlement was available and interest in its acquisition remained high. Most important, the relatively small peasant sector continuously displayed resourcefulness and some innovation as it tried to develop a survival economy or a "counter plantation system". It expanded small manufactures (charcoal, hoe sticks, farine manioc); it consolidated the logwood industry; it kept up the cultivation of cocoa before its potential as a second cash crop was recognized by planters after the 1850s; it captured a share of the local market for cane syrup by develop- ing "lilliputian" cane mills; it expanded the domestic food supply. But its full potential



33

could never be realized because the restriction on land settlement and discriminatory taxation of peasants' land and produce severely constrained its growth and activity. Predictably, as with share-cropping in the 1840s and 1850s, decision-makers had to be driven by the force of events to either recognize or concede the need for economic change in the direction of the peasant option. Therefore, from this perspective, the performance of the St. Lucian economy was mainly constrained by those agents which gave it its dominant characteristics. In other words, it was constrained by the vision and decisions of those who controlled the plantation and of those who gave it political support.

References/Suggestions for Further Reading

1. Yvonne Acosta and Jean Casimir, "Social Origins of the Counter-Plantation System in St. Lucia*', in P.I. Gomes (ed), Rural Development in the Caribbean, 1985.

2. H.H. Breen, St. Lucia, Historical, Statistical and Descriptive, 1844 (reprinted 1970).

3. B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807-1834,1984.

4. M. Louis, "An Equal Right to the Soil": The Rise of a Peasantry in St. Lucia 1838-1900. Ph.D. dissertation (Johns Hopkins University) 1981.

5. W.K. Marshall, The Social and Economic Development of the Windward Islands, 1838-1865. Ph.D. dissertation (Cambridge University) 1963.

6. , "Metayage in the sugar industry of the British Windward Islands, 1838-1865", Jamaica Historical Review, Vol. 5, May 1965.

7. Carleen O'Loughlin, Economic and Political Change in the Leeward and Windward Islands, 1968.

8. West India Royal Commission Report and Evidence, 1898 .



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