"Lives of great men all
remind us We can make our lives sublime And departing,
leave behind us, Footprints on the sands of time"
William Arthur Lewis was born in St. Lucia in
1915, the son of two persons, George Ferdinand Lewis and Ida
Lewis, who had immigrated to this country from Antigua. His mother
and father were originally teachers, his father having taught
after arriving in St. Lucia at various primary schools in this
island, then at St. Mary's College, the sole secondary school of
the island.
He later joined the public Service and at the
time of his death, when Arthur Lewis was seven years old, he was
an official of the Customs Department of St. Lucia. This early
circumstance meant that from very early ages, Arthur Lewis and his
four brothers were, if we wish to use the fashionable
jargon of today, members of a single-parent household. He was the
fourth of five sons of his parents.
To be the child of recent immigrants and then
to be left at an early age without a father, might have been
deemed considerble strikes against Arthur Lewis. But whenever he
wrote of his early life, he emphasized the tremendous fortitude,
discipline and persistence Of his mother in ensuring that her
children received the best fiat could, be afforded; and that they
took the utmost advantage of the only available route to
self—impelled progress - education. With a realism and sense of
humour which those who knew him recognise as characteristic, he
has observed in relation to his mother;
"As a youngster in school, I would
hear other boys talking about the superiorly of men over
women. I used to think they must be crazy."
It is fashionable too, in our islands in these
times, to decry the movement of people from one island to another
and to denigrate the potential contributions of those who move in
search of a better life. Clearly the life of Arthur Lewis, as well
as of his family, can lend no credence to such assertions.
Having left school at 14 after completing the
Cambridge School Certificate, he worked from a time in the Civil
service, then returned to school to take the exams for the single
Island Scholarship which at that time was only awarded
periodically, rather than annually, as is the case today.
During the course of this week, Mr. Winville
King has given on the radio a detailed outline of his early life
and of his basic achievements. So there is no need to repeat them
here. What we can note is his rapid ascent up the academic ladder
of the British University system as a result of the early
recognition, by those in authority, of his exceptional talent as
an economist, author and teacher. By the age of 33 he had acceded
to the prestigious Stanley Jevons Professorship of Political
Economy at the University of Manchester, having already been
Reader in Colonial Economics at the London School of Economics.
Having began his University teaching career in 193B, he concluded
it officially with his retirement in 1983, as James Miadison
Professor of Political Economy of the University of Princeton.
Between those two dates was a full, varied and
exceptional professional life, perhaps the high point of which, in
terms of the recognition of his work, was his sharing of the Nobel
Prize for Economics with T. W. Schultz in 1979.
The England to which Arthur Lewis travelled in
1933 and in which he undertook his first degree was a country in
partial economic recession, political ferment and intellectual
excitement. This was a period, in retrospect leading to the second
World War , in which British foreign policy was in much dispute.
It was a period of much analysis as to the causes of the great
depression. The capitalist system which seemed to be faltering was
coming under constant attack from those who believed in
alternative forms of political and economic organisation. The
British Labour parity, now a hothouse of intellectual ferment, was
increasingly consolidating its strength once again. London too was
becoming now a meeting place for a gathering number, of colonial
students and intellectuals analysing the effects of British
imperialism, and drumming at it as they began to see the
possibility for what later came to be called decolonisation.
Into this ferment Arthur Lewis, from all
appearances, jumped with enthusiasm. In discipinary terms he soon
began to see the subject which he was studying, economics, not
simply as an intellectual discipline to ,whose growth he should
contribute. Rather he felt that he should approach it as involving
an integral relationship between analysis and the search for
practical solutions to existing problems, as a means of rendering
policy advice. This brought the realisation that there might be
other factors involved in the solution of economic problems than
the purely economic, As he said, early on it was clear that he
would became an
"... applied economist. This did not
mean just that I should apply economics to industrial or other
structural problems. It meant that I would approach a problem
from its institutional background, recognising that the
solution was as likely to be in the institutional setting as
in the economic analysis".
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Under the influence of senior academics, Arthur
Lewis was to become, by the end of the Second World War , a
recognised authority in the United Kingdom on the economics of
industrial organisation. The subject was to become of much
practical importance in the post war period, not only as Britain
sought to revive its own industrial structure, but also because
with the accession of the British Labour Party to power, the
partial nationalisation of British industry induced a substantial
discussion as to the principles on which industry was to be
organised. Here Lewis' academic specialisation blended with his
applied economics and problem-solving approach. It took him
partially into the intellectual side of British politics as he
became an active and recognised member of the Fabian Society, the
leading Socialist research group loosely linked to the British
Labour Party. It led to the publication of what came to be one of
his better known works, The Principles of Economic Planning.
Lewis in a sense, by the end of the war, and
certainly by 1950 had, then, become a recognised "British
academic" a foremost authority among the rising generation of
post-war economists.
But Lewis was of course a west Indian. And as a
west Indian, part of the gathering core of intellectuals and
political activitists seeking a way out of colonialism and
beginning to think about the possibilities for and constraints on
the economic development of the colonies. George Padmore, Eric
Williams and others were in England. Pan Africanism as a mechanism
towards African independence was in the air. Lewis was fully a
part of the debates. But Lewis was first and foremost two things;
a west Indian and a researcher looking for practical ways out of
problems, rather than a political activist. So he started with the
west Indies. Let us hear his own description.
"My interest in the subject (of
economic development) was an offshoot of my anti-imperialism.
I can remember my father taking me to a meeting of the local
Marcus Garvey association when 'I was seven years old. So it
is not surprising that the first thing I ever published was a
Fabian Society pamphlet, called Labour in the West Indies,
which gave an account of the emergence of the trade union
movement in the 192O's and 30's and, more especially of the
violent confrontations between the unions and the government
in the 30's. This was not a propaganda pamphlet. It was based
on newspaper research and on conversations with some of the
union leaders."
But during the war, Britain needed all hands on
deck. Lewis like other leading economists, lent his services to
the British public service. And it was during the course of this,
he recalls, that he realised that the British were losing the
stomach for the maintenance of the colonial system. It was time
now to look at the possibilities of a post-colonial era. Thus
Lewis, in a sense, came to the study of the economics of
development. This coincided with two things: the first the
necessity to tutor colonial students both at the LSE and at the
University of Man caster, in economics; and to teach that
economics in a way that related to the problems which those
students, may at home were civil servants, would be faced with at
home. He was beginning to have to teach the economics of
development.
Secondly, Lewis had towards the end of
the
war begun to lecture on questions relating to the causes of the
great depression, the place of international trade in the
relations between nations, and consequently, of the forces that
engendered or inhibited international trade.
Thus began a lifelong interest in international
economic history which, as is easy to see, would coincide with the
question of what were the causes of economic growth and
development.
So here are the various strands of that varied
but, in a sense, integrated academic career, and career as a
policy adviser coming together: interest in economic organisation
and economic planning in industrial countries; interest in
economic development of the soon-to-be ex-colonial countries;
interest in the world economic and trading system as dominated by
the industrial countries but also, in a global context in which
the colonies as producers of primary commodities (agricultural and
mineral) became fully integrated into than world trading system
and therefore affected by it; and interest in economic planning
and economic organisation, now in ex-colonial countries.
This diversity of interests, yet integrated
interest, is reflected-in his major publications: Economic
Survey 1919 – 1939 on world trade and the depression
published in 1949; The Principles of Economics Planning
1950; The Theory of Economic Growth his magnum opus, 1955;
Development Planning in a sense his summation of his theoretical
work and practical experiences, 1966, Growth and Fluctuations 1879
– 1939, published in 1978, again on world trade; and in between
these, in 1954, his famous article "Economic Development with
Unlimited Supplies of Labour," in which he fused his
understanding of economic history with analysis of the forms of
economic organisation of the colonial economies, to produce a
sweeping model for future economic development in what today we
call the Third world.
But as Lewis made his reputation in this way,
and as he became involved in the practice of economic development
as Economic Adviser to Kwame Nkrumah, now Prime Minister of Ghana,
and as Deputy Managing Director of the U.N. Special Fund in the
second half of the 1950's, his own home and region remained a
central consideration for him.
In the 1950's universal suffrage had come to the West Indies.
The possibilities for self—government were opening. Lewis was,
in England, becoming familiar with some of the West Indian
students who were developing an interest in political careers.
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He was examine American policy with west
Indians partly in the context of the establishment of the
Caribbean Commission in Puerto Rico and of the experiment in
industrialisation that was beginning to be implemented in Puerto
Rico by the party led by Munoz Marin. Eric Williams was at the
Caribbean Commission. Lewis was keeping a keen eye on the rise of
the Labour movement and its involvement in new political
directions for the Nest Indies. Developments in 51, Lucia since
the end of the war and into the early fifties he would have been
well kept abreast of, since two of his brothers, Alien and victor,
were becoming well involved in politics and the labour movement
there.
With the completion of the Moyne Commission
report on the West Indian social and economic situation, the
British government was evolving an economic policy for the
Caribbean as it was for other colonies. Partially in disagreement
with this, and especially their line of policy for Jamaica, Lewis
published Industrial Development in the Caribbean in 1949.
This article has become well-known among students in the west
Indies. It spoke to the mode of economic development of Puerto
Rico, the significance of foreign investment for development, the
implications of the model for the English-speaking Caribbean. It
came to be called by the new generation of West Indian economists
in the 1960's Lewis' thesis of "industrialisation by
invitation", and came in for much critical analysis and
criticism by them.
This criticism of course could not be
divorced from their perception that by the second half of the
1950's, Lewis was in close consultation on policy with Norman
Manley, whose PNP had come to power in Jamaica in 1955, and Eric
Williams whose PNM had been elected in Trinidad in 1956. It led in
the academic sphere in the west Indies, in my judgement at any
rate, to an overemphasis on this limited part of Lewis' work and
an under-emphasis on his analysis of the motive forces of economic
growth; his advice that development was more than economic, his
study of the determinants of international trade and of its
effects on Third world countries economic growth. Too little
attention, in the west Indies and among west Indian academics came
to be given to the fact that, his major work, The Theory of
Economic Growth, had chapters entitled, "The will to
Economise", "Economic Institutions",
"Knowledge" "The Application of New Ideas",
and "Government", as he sought to locate the necessary
non-economic, social, sociological and attitudinal components in
economic growth and development.
But we must pause here: To notice that Arthur
Lewis who had gone to England at age 18, had in the midst of all
this activity, ceased, shall we say in the social sense, to be a
lone individual. In 1947 he married Gladys Jacobs, a Grenadian one
of whose parents also came from Antigua. His allusions to her in
various places suggest that she has been in all these years his
strategic helpmate, in my own mind his chief organiser, as he
moved from country to country, continent to continent, institution
to institution. Her life long devotion to him, along with her
strong-willed desire to ensure that things always went, always go,
right, must have reinforced in Arthur Lewis his earlier conviction
that those who believe in the superiority of men over women must
indeed be crazy. They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Barbara who
are with us today; and in the midst of this, Gladys
found time to develop and pursue a career as a sculptor whose
works are now exhibited.
In the second half of the 1960's discussions
about federation for the west Indies were increasing, and the idea
that this could became a reality was gathering force. Arthur
Lewis' convictions on this matter were well known and the actual
onset of federation, in 1958, tantalised him into returning fully
to the region, in 1959, first as Principal of the University
College and as vice Chancellor of the fully autonomous University.
He stayed for four years - to 1963: bitter-sweet years which saw
the failure of the Federation and then the failure of activities,
in which he was intensely engaged, to form an Eastern Caribbean
Federation. His pamphlet The Agony of the Eight well
records his sentiments and indeed his emotions on this issue. But
those who seek to pursue this course for the West Indies would
also serve themselves well in reading John Mordecai's The
Federal Negotiations. Both men, servants of the federal
experience of that time, cooperated to distill the appropriate
lessons from the era.
But 1959 - 1963 had its positive side. He oversaw the expansion
of the University from a single to a multi-campus institution
widening its doors, not without opposition, to large
numbers of west Indian people. He wrote, for us, some important
works on the relationship between education and economic
development and structure.
Arthur Lewis returned in 1963 to full time
academic life as Professor of Economics and International Affairs
at Princeton University. There he remained until his retirement in
1983. As indicated by some of the publications which I have noted,
his output of academic work continued to flourish. He wrote too on
the influence of politics and race on economic development.
Increasingly he was the recipient of may honours and honorary
degrees from institutions appreciative of his contributions. He
was made Knight Bachelor in 1963, was a leading member of all the
important academic societies of the western world, and became
President of the American Economic Association in.l983. He was
widely honoured by the Third world's academic institutions and
governments•
He returned on a full time basis once again to the west Indies
as President of the Caribbean Development Bank on its
establishment. That a country like St. Lucia his, birth place,
should now be such an extensive recipient of funds granted by or
through the CDB is, in no small measure, due to the credibility
which his tenure of office gave to that institution. That our own
Community College is named after him, lends immense prestige to it
and to us, and without a doubt facilitates our search for the
means of its development. W Arthur Lewis was an active man,
in the intellectual and practical senses. He was a humane man, a
man of wit, a man who believed that things, including the conduct
of government should be done correctly, regardless of the
criticism which so doing entailed.
"Lives of great men all remind us We
can make our lives sublime
And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the .sands of
time"
Arthur Lewis was one such great man - an
intellectual colossus who put it all to the service of his people.
We, his people - of his family, his country and
this region will bask with pride in his reflected glory.
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