W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics

Robert L. Tignor

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691202617, 9780691215716
• eBook ISBN: 9780691204246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

W. Arthur Lewis was one of the foremost intellectuals, economists, and political activists of the twentieth century. In this book, the first intellectual biography of Lewis, Robert Tignor traces Lewis's life from its beginnings on the small island of St. Lucia to Lewis's arrival at Princeton University in the early 1960s. A chronicle of Lewis's unfailing efforts to promote racial justice and decolonization, it provides a history of development economics as seen through the life of one of its most important founders.

If there were a record for the number of "firsts" achieved by one man during his lifetime, Lewis would be a contender. He was the first black professor in a British university and also at Princeton University and the first person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in a field other than literature or peace. His writings, which included his book The Theory of Economic Growth, were among the first to describe the field of development economics.

Quickly gaining the attention of the leadership of colonized territories, he helped develop blueprints for the changing relationship between the former colonies and their former rulers. He made significant contributions to Ghana's quest for economic growth and the West Indies' desire to create a first-class institution of higher learning serving all of the Anglophone territories in the Caribbean.

This book, based on Lewis's personal papers, provides a new view of this renowned economist and his impact on economic growth in the twentieth century. It will intrigue not only students of development economics but also anyone interested in colonialism and decolonization, and justice for the poor in third-world countries.

CHAPTER 1
Getting Started: Education and Race

WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS WAS BORN in the city of Castries on the small West Indian windward island of St. Lucia on January 23, 1915, the fourth of five sons of George and Ida Lewis. Although he spent the greater part of his adult life in England, Africa, and the United States, and only a small proportion in the West Indies, his experiences growing up in the Caribbean left an indelible imprint on his life. They imbued him with a lifelong interest in elucidating questions of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, and racial identity and discrimination that were deeply embedded in West Indian history.¹

PERSONALITY FORMATION

Lewis’s parents had migrated to St. Lucia from Antigua twelve years before his birth.² They came to an island, that, despite being part of the British Empire for more than a century, still retained much of its early French influence. Most inhabitants spoke a French-influenced Creole language and were Roman Catholics. In contrast, the Lewises were Protestants, probably originally Moravians, but in St. Lucia they became Anglicans, with a strong cultural and ideological orientation toward England. Despite their preference for English culture, or perhaps because of it, they saw themselves as a part of a distinct minority community. For the parents of Arthur and his four brothers, St. Lucia was a place to raise a family and to set their sons on a socially upward path by acquiring a first-rate English education. It was not a place where their children expected to live out their lives. It is no surprise that all of the Lewis children moved on to other parts of the world, using their intellects and their success at school to stake out careers in larger settings.³

The young Lewis, whose parents were originally schoolteachers, was from his earliest days a gifted student. So quick was he in his studies that when an illness required him to remain at home, three months of his father’s home schooling put him far ahead of his classmates. He was advanced two full grades over classmates. This promotion proved a mixed blessing. Associating with youngsters two years and three years older and physically more mature left Lewis with “a terrible sense of physical inferiority as well as an understanding … that high marks [were] not everything.”⁴

Although his father died when he was seven, his mother, Ida Lewis, proved equal to the task of raising the five boys. Lewis called her “the most highly disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.”⁵ She inspired her children to strive for high attainments by reminding them that “we are as good as they.”⁶ By this she meant that her children could perform as successfully as the privileged and powerful white elite. And achieve they did. One son became a psychiatrist, another a lawyer and judge, rising to become a Supreme Court justice for the Caribbean islands, and then later governor-general of St. Lucia; and yet another an important civil servant. Arthur owed more than he publicly acknowledged to his parents and his older brothers, but especially his mother, who was in charge of his rearing from age seven on. She instilled in her sons the virtues of discipline and hard work, a responsibility for making their way in the world, however hard the challenges might be, and a respect for fellow human beings. The family expected the older boys to look out for their younger siblings and to help them up the ladder of educational and occupational success.

Yet another factor in Lewis’s personality formation was religion convictions. Both parents were devout Anglicans, who were unafraid to ask for crucial financial and emotional support for their children from the St. Lucian clergy. Lewis imbibed a rigorous Church of England training at home and in his schooling to the extent that later in life, though no longer a practicing Christian, his mastery of biblical texts allowed him to debate the intricacies of Christianity with Protestant and Catholic clergy and Jewish rabbis. In lighthearted moments, he claimed to prefer Indian religions among all of the world religions because of their tenets of nonviolence. Yet there can be no denying that his youthful religious and moral upbringing suffused his research, teaching, and government work. He approached everything that he did with a spirituality and reverence for life.⁷

Of Lewis, it was said that he did not suffer fools easily. More to the point, however, was a determination to fashion his own fate and not to allow others to take advantage of him or to use his talents for their purposes. These traits, too, were part of the family ethos, which Lewis did not hesitate to characterize as being suffused with “the Protestant ethic.”⁸ They could make Lewis hard to deal with, “prickly” as several commentators, even good friends, noted. He would not allow himself to be placed in untenable political positions, as the officials of the Colonial Office and, after them, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana learned to their dismay. Rather than compromise ideals, he resigned lucrative and prestigious positions.

Ida Lewis also equipped Arthur with a determination not to be defeated in the face of racial discrimination, and instilled in him a highly developed sense of self-worth. His family values gave him the courage to speak his mind when he knew that he was right and circumstances were wrong. This influence, coupled with the strength of his Christian religious conviction, gave him a set of unshakeable beliefs and a personal grounding that saw him through many hard times.

The Lewis upbringing had its lighthearted moments as well. Lewis was no driven and obsessive upwardly mobile person, determined to get ahead at all costs. He enjoyed the amusing side of life. He had a delightful sense of humor that kept him from taking himself or life too seriously. When William Baumol, one of his closest and oldest friends, sent him a note, partly in jest, addressed “Dear Sir Arthur,” Lewis asked Baumol what he had done to offend his Princeton economics colleague. His most delightful photographs invariably show him relaxed and laughing. Nor could the many trying events that he experienced over his lifetime, often the result of racial slights, wear him down. He expected life to be full of ironies and disappointments. The history of human endeavors, he noted in a letter to one of his Princeton graduate students much later on, contained mainly a record of follies and mistakes, with occasional inspired successes.

Surely, Lewis also owed his determination to succeed academically and intellectually in the larger British world to his mother’s encouragement. Not only was he a brilliant student, but like all true intellectuals he lived for the world of the mind. It is difficult to imagine Lewis making his mark in politics, even though he suffered the outrages of racial discrimination as sharply as the other members of his generation. Radical politics, an arena that was becoming available to the rising West Indian intelligentsia of his generation, attracted those of a more extroverted and populist bent. In Lewis’s opinion, entry into the political arena compelled its practitioners to approach matters in partisan ways, even polemically. These methods did not suit Lewis’s temperament. To him, politics meant subordinating one’s passion for high intellectual achievement to political successes. It often entailed ignoring the understandings attainable in scholarly pursuits to improve the lot of others for immediate and highly personal political gains.

Lewis was acutely aware of the way that his upbringing and education led him to value intellect over emotion, even to hold his emotions on a tight rein. When confronted with personal dilemmas, say racial prejudice, or generalized problems, like the economic advance of colonized territories, he approached their resolution through reason. He sought to suppress emotional responses—and generally succeeded—a characteristic that renders a biographical study of him exceedingly difficult since he allowed few to penetrate behind the curtain of ratiocination that he drew around his persona. As he came into contact with politicians, first in Great Britain, and then much more intimately in Ghana and the West Indies, he came to have many reservations about the way that they allowed their political ambitions to warp their public policies. When asked in 1959 to compose a eulogy for George Padmore, one of the West Indies’s most flamboyant politicians and pan-Africanists, he spoke as much about his own temperament as he did of his fallen comrade. “We were respectful, rather than intimate friends. George was an active man of affairs, warm, pulsating, moving history along whereas I am an academic, unsure, critical, and contemplative.”⁹

The Influence of St. Lucia and the West Indies

The St. Lucian white population that surrounded the Lewis family and that was in many respects its model for success was a small one. It did not regularly come into contact with the majority black population. Here, the black majority was not subject to the daily humiliations that characterized the lives of, say, African Americans in the United States. This undoubtedly made it easier for Lewis to withstand the racial discrimination that he faced so overtly in the early years of his career and that he continued to deal with later on in more subtle forms. It also enabled him to embrace a nonracial liberalism and a strong sense of his common humanity with others. It did not shield him from the acute pain of racial discrimination, especially if it came at the hands of individuals, like educated Britons and later on Americans, whom he admired and who he thought should also accept a nonracial and humanitarian view of the world.

Though small, St. Lucia, like the rest of the Caribbean in the 1930s, was a colony marked by deep fissures. Like the other Crown Colony islands of the British West Indies it was rigidly controlled by its governor and the Colonial Office. Until universal adult suffrage finally arrived in 1950–51, a small white elite of landlords, merchants, and professional classes lorded it over “an oppressed peasant proprietary class fighting to maintain its precarious existence.”¹⁰ Poised awkwardly in between was a small group of educated blacks, including the Lewis family, who were able to take advantage of increased schooling opportunities and who were drawn to the education and values of the white elite but were subject to the same color discrimination that their poor and uneducated brethren experienced.

In his pamphlet The Negro in the Caribbean, Eric Williams, a future prime minister of Trinidad and a lifelong friend of Lewis, sensitively describes the dilemmas, as well as the advantages, of this rising class of educated black men and women. Gone were the days of slavery where “the social divisions were extremely simple: at the top of the pyramid was the small handful of whites—owners and overseers; the base was Negro slaves.” In place of this rigid two-tiered racial system, following emancipation in the 1830s, there had appeared a “colored middle class … usually light skinned, well educated, professional, and urban, … colored Europeans, in dress, … in tastes, in opinions, and in aspirations.”¹¹ These pioneers had, however, prepared the way for second and third generations, now farther removed from the era of slavery, less subjugated to the European world, and less ready to belittle their African roots. To this new generation Lewis and Williams belonged.

Finishing school at the age of fourteen, Lewis had to wait two years before he could sit for a competitive government examination that provided entry to a British university. He spent his time well, working as a clerk and learning “to write, to type, to file, and to be orderly. But this was at the expense of not reading enough history and literature, for which these years of one’s life are the most appropriate.”¹²

One West Indian historian described West Indian education and the Island Scholarship system that was at its apex and that bright lads like Lewis aspired to as “a murderously competitive regime, with pupils exercised like race horses in a steeplechase, only a cho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Getting Started: Education and Race
• Chapter 2: The Colonial Office
• Chapter 3: Unlimited Supplies of Labor
• Chapter 4: The Gold Coast
• Chapter 5: Ghana’s Chief Economic Adviser, 1957–58
• Chapter 6: Ghana: Part 2
• Chapter 7: The West Indies, 1959–63
• Chapter 8: The Princeton Years, 1963–91
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index