Prologue to a Biography
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Notes Preface and Acknowledgements 1. R. Skidelsky, ‘Introduction’, John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Britain 1937–1946 (Macmillan Papermac, 2000), p. xxii. 1 The Caribbean in Turmoil: Prologue to a Biography 1. Lewis Archive, Princeton, Box 1/10; ‘Autobiographical Account’ by Sir Arthur Lewis, prepared for Nobel Prize Committee, December 1979, p. 4. 2. Lewis (1939), p. 5. In the 1920s, the white population in St Lucia and on average across the islands, was relatively low, at about 3 per cent of the population. The proportion was higher than this on islands completely dominated by sugar cultivation, such as Barbados. 3. Lewis (1939), p. 7. On the significance of colour gradations in the social and power structures of the West Indies, see ‘The Light and the Dark’, ch.4 in James (1963) and Tignor (2005) notes: ‘In place of the rigid two-tiered racial system, there had appeared a coloured middle class … usually light skinned, well educated, professional and urban … To this generation, Lewis … belonged’ (p.11). 4. Lewis (1939), p. 5. 5. Lewis (1939), p. 9. 6. The total value of exports from St Lucia fell from £421,000 (£8.10 per cap- ita) to £207,000 (£3.91) between 1920 and 1925, and to £143,000 (£2.65) by 1930 (Armitage-Smith, 1931, p. 62). 7. These data derive from Sir Sydney Armitage-Smith’s financial mission to the Leeward Islands and St Lucia in the depths of the depression in 1931 – undertaken while Lewis was serving time in the Agricultural Department office waiting to sit his scholarship exam. Sir Sydney reported (Armitage-Smith, 1931, p. 72) that ‘there are only two trained teachers, the rest being ex-pupil teachers who have received a certificate from the Governor in Council which represents merely a licence to teach, these cer- tificates being graded first, second or third class according to the marks earned in an examination (80%, 60% or 33%.)’. The Lewises were certifi- cated teachers in the primary school system. They were staunch Anglicans. The two trained secondary school teachers in St Lucia were at the Roman Catholic St Mary’s College in Castries. Recruitment for these posts was normally via a London-based teacher-training college. One post was for a headmaster and one for a science teacher, who by the 1930s had in addition been given responsibility for agricultural extension, ‘imparting agricultural instruction and following up the planting material supplied by the Government Nurseries’ (Armitage-Smith, 1931, p. 106). Armitage- Smith added: ‘the best hope for the financial salvation of St Lucia lies in the acceleration of this planting’ (Armitage-Smith, 1931, p. 107). 270 Notes 271 8. The mission to the Eastern Caribbean islands led by Sir Sydney Armitage- Smith (Armitage-Smith, 1931, p. 71) recorded that ‘St Lucia is the [Caribbean] island where the English language is least widely spoken and understood’ and that ‘the educational standard of the Primary Schools is lower in St Lucia than in any of the other islands which I was instructed to visit’. 9. Lewis Archives, Princeton, Box 1/10: ‘Autobiographical Account’ by Sir Arthur Lewis, p. 1. 10. Marcus Garvey (1867–1940) was a Jamaican publisher, entrepreneur and orator, and an enthusiastic proponent of the interests of black peoples, both in the West Indies and globally. In this cause he founded, in 1914, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He established a Negro Factories Corporation with the intention that black entrepreneurs should be able to manufacture every marketable commodity in the West Indies, the United States and Africa, and attempted to develop Liberia as a perma- nent home for black people in Africa. 11. W. Arthur Lewis, ‘The Economic Status of Women’, Commencement address, Rosary College, Illinois, May 1970. (Lewis Papers, Princeton, Box 39/8, p. 1.) 12. Lalljie (1997) page 31. 13. Lewis engaged in 1952 in a dialogue with the Manchester industrialist Lord Simon of Wythenshawe about the quality of BBC music broadcast- ing; see Chapter 5. 14. Lewis described this adolescent part of his life as follows: ‘[From the age of eleven onwards] I was always in the company of boys two or three years older than myself. They flexed their muscles, but I had noth- ing to show. They played cricket in the first eleven, whereas I was in the fourth eleven. I acquired an acute inferiority complex with regard to my physique. I also learned that your acceptance into the group is not a mat- ter of academic performance only: you must meet their criteria as well as your own.’ (Lewis Archive, Princeton, Box 5/1: Autobiographical Account, reprinted in Breit and Spencer (1986). 15. Conversation with Andrew Downes (Professor of Economics, UWI), Manchester, 6 July 2004. 16. The prices of most of the primary exports of the West Indies, with the exception of bananas, were approximately halved between 1921 and 1939 (Moyne, 1945). 17. The writer Austin Clarke was brought up in Bridgetown, Barbados. Though a talented boy who passed the highly competitive examination for Combermere College in Barbados, he did not go on to take up an overseas scholarship. His mother, while ambitious for her son, lacked the status and education of Ida Lewis. She was a sugar cane worker. 18. Lewis Archive, Princeton, Box 1/10: ‘Autobiographical Account’ by Sir Arthur Lewis, prepared for Nobel Prize Committee, December 1979, p. 2. 19. When invited in 1984 by William Darity, a black economist of some dis- tinction at the University of Tulsa, to collaborate with him in writing his (Lewis’s) intellectual biography, Lewis replied baldly, ‘I am not willing to do so’, Lewis Archive, Princeton, Box 4/5: Lewis to Darity, 1 November 1984. 272 Notes 2 ‘Marvellous intellectual feasts’: The LSE Years, 1933–48 * The authors are grateful to reproduce the paper ‘Marvellous Intellectual Feasts: Arthur Lewis at the London School of Economics 1933–48’, History of Political Economy, vol.45, issue 2, pp. 187–221. Copyright 2013, Duke University Press. Reproduced by permission of Duke University Press. 1. Tignor (2005), p. 35. 2. Autobiographical Account in Breit and Spencer (1986). 3. Heinz Arndt had arrived at the LSE as a postgraduate student via Lincoln College, Oxford. His father, Fritz Arndt, was a prominent academic dis- missed from the University of Breslau in 1933. The family had been helped to escape from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s through the efforts of the Academic Assistance Council founded by William Beveridge in 1933. The Council was instrumental in Fritz Arndt’s appointment to the Department of Organic Chemistry at Oxford. In 1948, when Lewis had left the LSE for Manchester, the young Heinz Arndt drew on their LSE friendship for advice regarding his own application for a Readership in international trade that was being advertised at the University of Manchester. Lewis encouraged Arndt to apply but warned that his application was likely to encounter problems because he did not have the support of Professors John Jewkes and John Hicks, both of whom had recently vacated Chairs at Manchester. The episode is related in the biography of Arndt by Coleman et al. (2007). 4. Lewis, Autobiographical Account in Breit and Spencer (1986) p. 2. 5. Ronald Coase had also entered the LSE (in 1929) to study for the B.Com. degree. In his Nobel speech (1991) he related how, in 1931, he ‘had a great stroke of luck. Arnold Plant was appointed Professor of Commerce … He was a wonderful teacher. I began to attend his seminar … It was a revelation.’ 6. Information on the career of Arnold Plant is from Ronald Coase, ‘Professor Arnold Plant: His Ideas and Influence” in M. A. Anderson (ed.), The Unfinished Agenda: Essays in Honour of Arthur Seldon (London: Institute of Economic Affairs,1986). 7. From Plant (1974). The book was given a favourable review by Ronald Coase (1977). 8. Plant (1965). 9. Lewis had a lifelong attachment to the nineteenth century, and in 1951 wrote an article in The Manchester Guardian to explain how much pleasanter the mid-nineteenth century, with its spirit of enterprise, its low unemploy- ment and its low inflation, was than the mid-twentieth century. Much later, while on the verge of retiring from Princeton and already declining invita- tions to write books and papers, he said that the main thing he wanted to do in his retirement was to read nineteenth-century novels (see Chapter 8). 10. Mill (1994[1847]), p. 16. The quotation, relevant to Lewis’s own writings on social democracy and socialism, continues: ‘these (social institutions and policies) being supposed, the question of Socialism is not, as gener- ally stated by Socialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge against the evils which now bear down humanity; but a mere question of comparative advantages, which futurity must determine’. 11. The story of the CSRRC is told in Mills (2002). 12. Lewis, Autobiographical Account in Breit and Spencer (1986), p. 3. Notes 273 13. Sociology was a discipline favoured by women students at the LSE. During the Cambridge years the sociology department grew rapidly. Judith Hart, later Minister of Overseas Development in the Wilson government, was an LSE sociology undergraduate at Cambridge and Secretary of the Cambridge University Labour Club during the LSE wartime evacuation. 14. Interviewed in Montreal by telephone, October 2006. 15. The female students from Bedford College were formally assigned to Newnham but they seem to have had a particularly bleak time, being ‘offered to Cambridge householders as an alternative to evacuated school chil- dren and their mothers’; Cambridge University Archives, Accommodation London Colleges, 1940. 16. LSE Archives: Letter to Lewis from Hailey at the Colonial Office, September 1941.