Introduction

Abstract

The Caribbean all too rarely features in studies of International Political Economy (IPE). Even when it does, the focus is usually upon the larger countries or the region as a whole is cast in a supporting role in a seemingly more exciting global saga, such as that pertaining to multilateral trade politics. The tiny island microstates in the eastern archipelago, especially, seldom enjoy the lead in their own story (although for two recent exceptions, see Vlcek 2008; Cooper 2011). Moreover, the non-independent Caribbean, which comprises a diverse range of British, Dutch, French, and even American, territories, is even pline with ‘global’ pretensions. This is especially so given that, until comparatively recently, this region was the beating heart of what we now call the Global Political Economy (GPE). ‘King Sugar’, and the wealth that it produced on the back of West Indian slave labour was the commodity that facilitated the growth and development of the industrial West, and these tiny islands held an importance that appears incomprehensible today (Williams 1970, 1980). In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, France was prepared to cede the whole of Canada (including Québec) and the American mainland east of the Mississippi River for just the island of Guadeloupe, and the riches that sugar and slaves could provide.

Père Labat, in a lyrical passage of his Nouveau Voyage aux Iles d’Amérique (1722) used the beauty of the Caribbean belle negresse to support his grave plea for the rhythm of history which, as he saw it, held all of the islands together in a common destiny. “I have travelled everywhere in your sea of the Caribbean,” he wrote, “… from Haiti to Barbados, to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and I know what I am speaking about … You are all together, in the same boat, sailing on the same uncertain sea … citizenship and race unimportant, feeble little labels compared to the message that my spirit brings to me: that of the position of and predicament which History has imposed upon you … It is no accident that the sea which separates your lands makes no difference to the rhythm of your body”. That splendid invocation, today no less than in Père Labat’s eighteenth century, remains the ultimate raison d’être of the West Indian scene.

Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, 1968