The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

This book examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. It is divided into three parts, each centered around a particular case study: the first focuses on the nineteenth century ('The Age of Free Trade'); the second considers the period up to 1960 ('The Age of Preferences'); and the final section concerns the half century from the Cuban Revolution to the present ('The Age of Globalization'). The study makes use of a specially constructed database to observe trends across the whole region and chart the progress of nearly thirty individual countries. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba and Haiti.

Tourism development in the Dominican Republic: An examination of the economic impact to coastal households

“…''Disguised'' unemployment occurs when there is an excess of labor such that an individual's productive value is lessened or becomes redundant because there are fewer vital jobs than there are employees (Wellisz, 1968). It has historically been a recurring issue in many Caribbean nations including Cuba and Guyana, though the DR has more recently experienced problems with open unemployment (Bulmer-Thomas, 2012). Open unemployment in the DR is believed to occur where laborers are not compensated in a way that matches their level of skill or education, a symptom of neoliberal economic policy.…”

Beyond Free Trade

“…The decline of preferential trade has been devastating for the Caribbean, destroying traditional industries in bananas and sugar, intensifying unemployment and out-migration, and fuelling public debt crises as governments scramble to make up for revenue shortfalls (Fridell 2011, Richardson andRichardson Ngwenya 2013). Far from a passionate concern for "reciprocity," the EU's declining support for preferential trade has been largely driven by the changing nature of EU development cooperation aimed now at the poorest developing countries, intense pressure from the United States and Latin American countries opposed to the preferences, and the perception that defending preferential trade distracted EU trade negotiators from bigger priorities with booming Asian economies (Rose 2010, Bulmer-Thomas 2012. Caribbean states, for their part, rather than embracing the new "reciprocal" relationship with the EU, have turned increasingly toward new alliances with Southern powers seeking to meet their own statecraft needs through non-reciprocal South-South trade and cooperation.…”

The Political Economy of Caribbean Development

“…They have also held up reasonably well -despite some precipitous declines in growth rates -throughout the global crisis. However, as Victor Bulmer- Thomas (2012) has recently argued, such measures can only tell us so much. In the Caribbean, seemingly impressive growth and GDP statistics conceal all manner of problems, not least those relating to fragmentation between -and inequality within -territories, as well as pronounced economic vulnerability, subtle patterns of decline, and, most critically for our purposes in this book, structured exclusion on the part of specific segments of the population.…”