“The modern Caribbeaneconomy was invented, structured and managed by European states for onepurpose: to achieve maximum wealth extraction to fuel and sustain theirnational financial, commercial and industrial transformation.” So begins How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: AReparation Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder and Poverty as HilaryMcD. Beckles continues the groundbreaking work he began in Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and NativeGenocide. We are now ina time of global reckoning for centuries of crimes against humanity perpetratedby European colonial powers as they built their empires with the wealthextracted from the territories they occupied and exploited with enslaved and,later, indentured labour. The systematic brutality of the transatlantic tradein enslaved Africans and the plantation economies did not disappear with theabolition of slavery. Rather, the means of exploitation were reconfigured toensure that wealth continued to flow to European states. Independencefrom colonial powers in the twentieth century did not mean real freedom for theCaribbean nations, left as they were without the resources for meaningfuldevelopment and in a state of persistent poverty. Beckles focuses his attentionon the British Empire and shows how successive governments have systematicallysuppressed economic development in their former colonies and have refused to acceptresponsibility for the debt and development support they owe the Caribbean.
