English-Speaking Caribbean Countries have Big Political Differences

 

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

People may assume that the British Empire was a homogenous enterprise. But it was not. Governance diverged so much between places like India, New Zealand and Nigeria, to select a few examples, that in reality the empire’s colonies and protectorates might as well have been parts of different realms.

This also held true for Britain’s Caribbean possessions. The colonial administrations of Barbados and Jamaica, for example, managed these two islands quite differently and, as a result, they developed different sets of colonial institutions even before independence in the early 1960s. This has had a continuing impact on the economies and political cultures of the two countries, as any visitor can attest.

From around 1655 until 1865, Jamaica was governed by the plantation owners and their representatives. They did not care much about the economic progress of the island, but were concerned only with enriching themselves. However, their horrific mismanagement forced Britain to bring Jamaica under direct rule.

Only after Jamaica became a Crown Colony, lasting until independence in 1962, was there a dramatic increase in public investment in health, education and infrastructure by the government. Jamaica lagged behind Barbados because this started much later.

Barbados and Jamaica are both parliamentary democracies in the Westminster tradition. Their constitutions protect private property. Both adopted legal systems based on English common law.

So why did Jamaica and Barbados, which had similar income levels until the late 1960s, end up diverging so much? From 1960 to 2002, Barbados’ GDP per capita grew roughly three times as fast as Jamaica’s. Consequently, the income gap between Barbados and Jamaica is now almost five times larger than at independence. The GDP per capita in Barbados, population 281,635, is $27,671, as compared to $8,492 for Jamaica’s 2,827,000 people.

Economists Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller, in their paper “Institutions vs. Policies: A Tale of Two Islands,” claim that the divergence lies not with differences in institutions but differences in macroeconomic policy.

Jamaica’s socialist policies in the early 1970s, they write, including nationalization of industry, import barriers, subsidies for basic goods, and high deficits, did long-term damage, while Barbados’ relatively neoliberal policies avoided hurting its economy much during those troubled years.

Jamaica did make a big push for export-oriented industrialization, starting with exactly the kinds of labour-intensive light manufacturing industries that have worked well for the successful industrializers. Established in the 1970s and 1980s, the Jamaican Free Zones provided tax exemptions for businesses, facilitated foreign investment, and favoured export-oriented industries like textiles.

But the Free Zones never took off. Even with all the tax breaks, Jamaican manufacturing was just never competitive. It didn’t provide people with what they considered decent work.

Still, it isn’t all just about economic issues. Rasheed Griffith, executive director of the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute, argues that Jamaica’s economic performance has also been negatively affected by a history of violence that Barbados lacks. He also points to long-standing differences in literacy rates between the two countries, as well as more continuity of legislative institutions in Barbados. In 1946 Barbados was 91 per cent literate while Jamaica’s rate was 74 per cent.

Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson in his book The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament has investigated the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty.

Rabid violence continues to be a factor. In December 2022 the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness, declared a state of emergency because of the perpetual killings. According to several indices, Jamaica has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

The system of plantation-based slavery was exceptionally cruel in Jamaica. It was an especially dangerous place with a reputation for constant slave rebellions. Whereas in Barbados, there was just a single slave revolt during the entire period of slavery.

Jamaica’s brutality made for an exceptionally high mortality rate. Consequently, the enslaved population needed to be replenished more often. In Barbados, the locally born slave population of “creoles” exceeded the African-born population a few decades after the slave system began.

Even after the abolition of slavery in 1834, conditions in Jamaica remained dismal. Britain terminated the Jamaican Assembly and placed Jamaica under direct Crown Colony rule. In Barbados, though, its Assembly remained in place up until the 1950s where it transitioned to a self-ruling parliament.

Barbados (known as “Little England”) was akin to a settler colony, but this was not the case in Jamaica. Barbados is small, at 430 square kilometres, and could be easily protected, while Jamaica is about 26 times bigger, at 10,991 square km.

Jamaica is a society with low levels of trust, both a lack of trust of those in authority and lack of trust between ordinary people. The political establishment is so corrupt that there is a term specifically applied to it: garrison politics, in which criminal and political activity are controlled by politically affiliated gang leaders.

In such an environment, productivity is likely to be low. The issues facing Jamaica require a collective sense of urgency and effort to fix. All of this has contributed to massive emigration. On the other hand, Barbados, now a parliamentary republic, remains one of the Caribbean’s most stable polities.