The Political Element in the Works of W. Arthur Lewis: The 1954 Lewis Model and African Development

Abstract

William Arthur Lewis, the Nobel Prize awardee in 1979, was actively involved in politics and policymaking. During World War II, Lewis was appointed to be a young advisor to the British Colonial Office where he came into direct collision with the mainstream laissez-faire philosophy. After the War, Lewis took the lead in a Fabian conference on colonial question, and his encounter with Kwame Nkrumah eventually compelled him to write an important monograph on the prospect of plural governance in Africa. Through a rereading of Lewis's original texts, it is demonstrated that his emphasis on peasant-led agricultural development and advocacy of political pluralism were consistently manifested in his academic and nonacademic writings on tropical regions, especially on Africa, contrary to the conventional interpretation of his 1954 model of "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour," which has tended to pin much faith on top-down industrialization.

Food Dependency in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Simply a Matter of ‘Vulnerability’, or Missed Development Opportunity?

“…Lewis continually argued for that support. In the 1950s, when colonial governments were producing development plans for countries on the road to independence, he pushed hard for peasant support, even while conceding that, ‘when all the purposes for which capital is required are added together they make a formidable bill’ (Lewis, , quoted in Mine, : 332; Lewis, : 90). More recently, echoing Lewis, Storm (: 685) writes that, to early development economists, it was ‘understood that agricultural modernization was not free’.…”