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What was the time period like?:

Lewis was influenced in his formative years by the impact of the Great Depression (1929-39) on the West Indies. The dependency of the colonies on the UK in particular meant that when economic activity fell, the demand for exports from the West Indies also suffered. Lewis recorded statistics of this decline in his book, World production, Prices, and Trade, 1870-1960.  

Between 1928-33, exports fell between 37% and 71% for Commonwealth Caribbean countries. And again, between 24% and 74% between 1938-40, except in Guyana (16%), St Vincent, and the Grenadines (5%). Colonial nations were both exploited for their cheap resources and labour, and were made vulnerable to causes of the change of economic production in richer colonising nations – such as the Great Depression and World War II.

Before joining the London School of Economics in Britain, Lewis would have experienced the beginning of the labour rebellions of the 1930s in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Often the largest employers of each island was the primary exporter company, such as the sugar, industry in Antiguia, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts, and Trinidad. Oil, banana, and bauxite production was all prominent in Trinidad, Jamiaca, and Guyana respectively. For Belize, logging and lumber was the largest employer.

The right to vote was limited for the colonies in the 1930s. You needed to possess property or a certain level of income to qualify for the vote, meaning around 10% of the adult population could participate, leaving control in the hands of British appointed Governors. Only Jamaica and Guyana had laws permitting trade unions, but even they were not allowed to strike and picket peacefully around employers premises.

Trinidad had an unoffical union, the Trinidad Workingmens Association, since 1897, which became legal through 1932 legislation similar to Jamaica’s. Grenada and St Lucia also achieved trade union powers, but it remained illegal in the remaining Caribbean colonies.

Although Lewis left St Lucia in 1932 and worked in a relatively privileged and well-paid part of the economy – as a government employee – his early life was informed by a spectacle of stark inequality and injustice, the impoverishment of his fellow countrymen, and resistance from Britain to give freedoms and autonomy to their colonised subjects.

At the time of his arrival in Britain, London was the intellectual centre of anti-colonial struggles and meetings. Due to Britain’s concentration of wealth and power at the imperial centre, the most respected forms of education could be achieved through British universities.

This attracted the ablest members of colonised societies, which Britain would train to run the administration of the colonies. However, as early as 1900, when the first Pan-African Conference was held in London, 23 to 25 July, localised anti-colonial struggles were beginning to become transnational as colonised people from around the British Empire were able to meet and consolidate their efforts.

Lewis reflects on how he became part of this force:

“In London, meeting fellow anti-imperialists from all over the world, I launched upon a systematic study of the British colonial empire and its practices — colour bars, prohibiting Africans from growing coffee in Kenya so that they were forced into the labour market to work for cash to pay their taxes, and all the rest”.

When Lewis had been making his choice of what degree to study, he was faced with his own reality of structural racism in a non-academic sense. There were legal restrictions placed on people of colour within the colonies,  restricting them from higher-skilled and higher-paid jobs in British-controlled industries.

This meant law or medicine were popular career choices because an affluent living could be made as an independent practitioner without government support. Lewis wanted to be an engineer, but believed this was “pointless since neither the government nor the white firms would employ a black engineer”. Despite Lewis’ clear abilities and merit, his choices in life were limited by the institutionalised structural racism of the late colonial era.

When he arrived in Britain, he then faced a mixture of this institutionalised form of racism – formal rules about what jobs people of colour could not do – and social racism, which had  its own structural impacts. Lewis had a celebrated academic career, but he recalls how he was,

“subjected to all the usual disabilities – refusal of accommodation, denial of jobs for which he had been recommended, generalised discourtesy and the rest”.

For example, in 1937, he failed to achieve a job as an administrator for the Colonial Services in Port of Spain, Trinidad, despite having a first-class degree. However, by 1941, he was undertaking research for the Colonial Office. Whilst there may not have been any formal rules against people of colour taking administrative jobs or renting accommodation, there were no legislative rights to stop people from discriminating against people because of their race, just as there was nothing to stop people from being openly racist in public.

When Lewis was appointed to a temporary assistant lectureship in 1938, the decision was unanimous, yet his teaching was restricted because of informal racist ideas that created structural barriers because those in power held those racist views. LSE Director, Alexander Carr-Saunders explains how he felt he had to restrict Lewis’ role and explain his appointment to the Court of Governors because it went against the agreed norm that people of colour were not permitted into the same elite spaces as white people.

“He would therefore not see students individually but in groups. The Appointments Committee is, as I said, quite unanimous but recognise that the appointment of a coloured man may possibly be open to some criticism. Normally, such appointments do not require the confirmation of the Governors but on this occasion I said that I should before taking any action submit the matter to you.”

This is an intriguing insight into the diversity of opinion about people of colour in the first half of the c.20th. Carr-Saunders clearly wanted to hire Lewis for his ability and yet felt pressured by social attitudes to assure it was supported by the Governors of the university. He was scared about criticism, most likely from other academic institutions, and although there were no formal rules against hiring people of colour, social racism was strong enough to create a structural barrier Lewis had to deal with.

As an academic, Lewis described himself as a “social democrat”, in contrast to the “laissez-faire liberal” theory of his colleague, Professor Sir Arnold Plant, a leading practitioner in Lewis’ field of industrial economics at the LSE. This put his thinking on the Left side of the political-economic field.

Lewis developed as a leading economist, overcoming barriers to entry into the elite academic world, and contributed to the wave of Keynesian economic thinking that dominated the two decades following the end of the Second World War. He theorised ways for formerly colonised nations to create their own economic development through the use of state policies that would help them catch up with the more advanced economies of the colonial powers, such as Britain.

Whilst Lewis faced everyday racism and its manifestation in work and housing, he was a well-educated man, who was able to access scarce opportunities to fund his academic career. As this history shows, he was an exceptionally talented individual and that is not being challenged by pointing out his circumstances.

Furthmore, his experience would have been significantly different from a woman of colour at this time, a person of colour who was LGBT, or a person of colour with a disability. The experience of racism and British colonial rule also varied by colony and by ethnicity. As a historian, is it important to distinguish between what can be said as broad generalisations (all people of colour experienced racism at this time) and the specifics within this understanding (educated, men of colour experienced both a similar and different form of racism to…).