Science at the end of empire

Experts and the development of the British Caribbean, 1940-62

Sabine Clarke

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526131416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

This book is open access under a CC BY license.This is the first account of Britain's plans for industrial development in its Caribbean colonies – something that historians have usually said Britain never contemplated. It shows that Britain's remedy to the poor economic conditions in the Caribbean gave a key role to laboratory research to re-invent sugarcane as the raw material for making fuels, plastics and drugs. Science at the end of empire explores the practical and also political functions of scientific research and economic advisors for Britain at a moment in which Caribbean governments operated with increasing autonomy and the US was intent on expanding its influence in the region. Britain's preferred path to industrial development was threatened by an alternative promoted through the Caribbean Commission. The provision of knowledge and expertise became key routes by which Britain and America competed to shape the future of the region, and their place in it.

CHAPTER ONE

New uses for sugar

On the 22 June 1937, Royal Marines from HMS Ajax landed at Pointe-à-Pierre in the south of Trinidad. The navy was responding to a request from the Governor for help to suppress riots that had resulted in the deaths of twelve people. The Times reported, ‘One hundred and fifty marines and blue jackets from HMS Ajax are setting up machine-guns to protect the oil fields.’¹ Another navy ship, HMS Exeter, arrived at Trinidad the following day.² Whilst the violent protests that gripped the island had subsided by the 6 July, three weeks later, a crowd attacked Government House in Bridgetown, Barbados. Four days of unrest followed across the sugar estates of the island, including attacks on shops and lorries and instances of arson, and the Royal Navy were called again. The next year, police fired on a group of protestors at a sugar estate in Frome, Jamaica, leading to a period of violence in the colony. This time the British government responded by appointing a Royal Commission, headed by Lord Moyne, to investigate the conditions that had provoked Caribbean populations to protest on such a scale.

The riots that occurred in the British West Indian colonies during the 1930s have been endowed with much significance by both historians of British imperialism and historians of the Caribbean. Accounts of imperial policy tell how these events were crucial in allowing the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, to get his way in passing the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940.³ This Act is considered a turning point in colonial policy as it marked a shift to a more assertive, interventionist form of imperialism that aimed to transform Britain’s colonies through development. For historians of the Caribbean, the strikes and riots of the interwar period are a defining moment on the journey towards political independence.⁴These widespread instances of rebellion illustrate the agency of the subject populations of the British West Indies as people seized the opportunity to protest their grievances over issues such as the slow pace of political change, low wages, inadequate food and housing and the racism they experienced from their employers.⁵

The consequences for the British Caribbean of new legislation for development have been largely unexplored.⁶ Almost without exception, we are told only that policy after 1940 for the British West Indies was dictated by the report of the Moyne Commission. In fact, the Colonial Office in London conceived a radical plan for the economic development of the British West Indies that marked a major departure both from previous approaches and from the recommendations of the recent Royal Commission. This policy sought a new and permanent solution to the problem of the low price for sugar that officials considered to be at the root of much unrest. For officials, the lesson of the Great Depression was that profits in the sugar industry could not be maintained on the basis of continuing increases in the volume of production. A new era of prosperity was possible, however, if cane sugar could be reinvented as a raw material for the expanding field of synthetic manufacturing. As chemical companies developed new plastics and medical products, there was increasing demand for supplies of cheap and plentiful starting materials. The Colonial Office decided a programme of scientific research was needed to transform sugar from foodstuff to industrial starting compound. Laboratory investigation was endowed with the power to reverse the long decline of the Caribbean.

This chapter will show how concerns at the Colonial Office around 1940 about the economic future of the British West Indies were expressed as concerns about the future of the sugar industry. While distress was not limited to workers in this industry, and sugar was no longer the principal export of all British Caribbean colonies, it was conditions in this industry that frequently drew the greatest criticism. In addition, the sugar industry was still the biggest employer in the British colonies of the region and when discontent spread amongst workers on the estates it threatened the stability of entire territories. British officials sought a way to revive the fortunes of the Caribbean sugar industry so as to placate colonial agitators and critical foreign governments in the short term and return economic prosperity to this region of the Colonial Empire in the longer term.

An industry in decline

Questions were raised about the long-term future of the Caribbean sugar industry from at least the 1890s, and then in 1934 the price of sugar dropped to an unprecedented low. Officials at the Colonial Office perceived the crisis of the interwar years as different from previous episodes of price instability, believing the world sugar market had now reached the point of saturation. Since profits and wages could no longer be maintained through increases in production, a bleak future existed for the Caribbean. Both the character of the crisis and the timing of it led to a break with previous policy and a search for a new and different solution to the problem of Caribbean sugar.

In the eighteenth century, the West Indian colonies were said to be the richest part of the British Empire, and in 1770 it was estimated that the annual profits from Caribbean sugar were £1.7 million.⁷ Sugar from British imperial sources was privileged in the British market from the beginning. From 1651, the Navigation Acts restricted foreign imports to England and its colonies by dictating that only English ships could take goods to the ports of these places. Since the Navigation Acts prevented the movement of English goods directly to foreign ports, they were initially unpopular with sugar planters who wanted access to lucrative foreign markets. Planters were compensated for this loss of trade with other nations through the near-monopoly of the English market.⁸ Preferential tariffs were introduced from 1651, with the duties on foreign sugar rising from 270 per cent to 340 per cent of that on West Indies sugar by 1705.⁹ In the eighteenth century, episodes during which planters experienced falling profits and production were followed by periods of recovery, and the overall trend was of rising sugar consumption in Britain. Permanent difficulties in the sugar industry of the British West Indies did not become apparent until after 1815.¹⁰

Decline in the value of sugar from the British West Indies began to occur after emancipation, but was the result of a complex of factors rather than the end of slavery alone. Advocates of free trade first brought an end to preferential tariffs for empire sugar, before duty on sugar was removed altogether in 1874¹¹ and the Navigation Acts suspended in 1849.¹² As the price for sugar fell, consumption increased sharply, however, from 18 lb per head in Britain in 1800–1809 to 84.7 lb by 1900–1909.¹³ Overall, between the 1840s and 1860s West Indian manufacturers saw a decline in value of around 6 per cent but production increases of around 45 per cent.¹⁴ Historians have shown that the post-emancipation pattern of production varied considerably between the colonies of the British West Indies. In Barbados, production grew substantially, with the same trend occurring to a lesser extent in Guiana, Trinidad and St Kitts. Sugar planters in Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad secured a new source of cheap labour from East Asia with the introduction of indentureship in the 1840s, and wages for sugar labourers generally were kept low through the limited availability of land for peasant agriculture, leaving many people with little alternative but to work on the estates.¹⁵ The maintenance of a source of cheap labour did not prevent rapid decline in the sugar industry in Jamaica between 1840 and 1860, however, although the consequences for the island’s economy were moderated somewhat by the production of large amounts of rum.¹⁶

The factor that caused the greatest problems in the nineteenth century was increasing competition from beet sugar grown in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the growing market share of cane sugar from Java and Cuba. From 1850 to 1900, beet expanded its share of the world market from 16 per cent to 65 per cent, stimulated by the provision of bounties on beet sugar exports which were particularly generous in the case of Germany and Austria, and the introduction of improved, high-yielding varieties of beet.¹⁷ By the 1890s, the British West Indies sugar industry was considered to be in the midst of severe crisis. A slump in price to 10 shillings per cwt (from a high of 97 shillings per cwt in 1814)¹⁸ led to the abandonment of estates, low wages and riots in St Kitts and Guiana in 1896.¹⁹ In that year a West India Royal Commission was appointed to consider the claim that the sugar industry of the British West Indies could only survive in the future with assistance from Britain.²⁰ In its report, the commission, led by Sir Henry Norman, made a number of recommendations that encompassed the need to have greater diversity of economic activity in Britain’s Caribbean territories, including the promotion of peasant agriculture.

Concern about the decline of the West Indies had wider ramifications at the end of the nineteenth century, leading some politicians to advocate a shift in imperial approach towards ‘constructive imperialism’ in which tariff reform would improve empire trade and provide revenue for initiatives at home. The Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain is the most famous advocate of a departure from the strict principles of free trade in favour of the promotion of imperial interests. Chamberlain hoped to counter the bounty system used by European countries producing beet sugar by introducing duties on foreign sugar imports. He also asserted that the development of the full economic potential of the colonies would require loans and grants from Britain as a stimulus to greater private investment.²¹

The full ambitions of Chamberlain and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1  New uses for sugar
• 2  Scientific research and colonial development after 1940
• 3  ‘Men, money and advice’ for Caribbean development
• 4  Laboratory science, laissez-faire economics and modernity
• 5  An industrialisation programme for Trinidad
• 6  Bringing research ‘down from the skies’
• Conclusion: Science and industrial development: lessons from Britain’s imperial past
• Bibliography
• Index