Conclusion

This concluding chapter reflects on W. Arthur Lewis's death on June 15, 1991, and his legacy. Since his days growing up on the island of St. Lucia and studying at the London School of Economics, he had focused his writings, research, teaching, and public service on three critical issues: racial justice, end of empire, and improved standards of living for the less well off. The instrumentality to accomplish these goals became the field of economics, in large part, as he so often reminded people, because he was unable to pursue what had once seemed to him more attractive occupations. Lewis would never have suggested that his life should be measured by the successes that he had in advancing these goals, but there is much to be said for concluding this study by considering the methods that Lewis favored and the achievements that he realized in the three arenas that he held so high: eradicating racial injustice, bringing empires to a close, and promoting worldwide economic progress. Ultimately, development economics was the academic interest in which Lewis made his most lasting contributions, and it was as a development economist that he came to prominence after World War II.

Ghana: Part 2

This chapter looks at how W. Arthur Lewis left Ghana as a member of the Ghanaian delegation to the all-African conference meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He did not return. In Addis, he announced his intention to take up a new post at the United Nations. He did not, however, sever his ties with Ghana, and he was to return briefly in 1963 to offer advice on the Seven-Year Development Plan. Because he had not had time to train a replacement, his departure left the Ghanaians without a fulltime economic adviser. The responsibility for drafting the budget and overseeing the five-year plan devolved on a variety of outside consultants and Ghanaian ministers themselves. At first Ghana drifted in the direction of more state controls over the economy and greater suspicion of the free market; but by 1960 and 1961 the drift had become a full-scale push as the state began to replace the Lewis programs that had featured a mixed economy with ones that looked exclusively to the state. The early pressures to scrap the Lewis economic policies and move to the left came as much in response to problems that had haunted the Ghanaian economy throughout the late 1950s as to ideology, notably trade and budgetary deficits.

The Gold Coast

This chapter details how, at the end of 1952, shortly after returning from a tour of Asia where his intellectual breakthrough led to the article on unlimited supplies of labor, W. Arthur Lewis received an invitation to advise the government of the Gold Coast on industrialization. The invitation came not from British colonial offices in the Gold Coast, but the rising nationalist party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), led by its charismatic political leader, Kwame Nkrumah. The vitality of the Gold Coast nationalists impressed Lewis, and the opportunity to advise Africans, rather than British officials, was new and exciting. Although he spent only several months of 1952 in the Gold Coast, preparing the report, and immediately returned to his teaching position at Manchester, his stay linked him to the Gold Coast and its leaders. From then onwards, British officials and Gold Coast nationalists alike regarded him as the top expert on their economy and turned to him to evaluate economic projects. Ultimately, the decision to advise the Gold Coast on its industrial prospects led Lewis away from purely academic endeavors and placed him squarely in the public arena.

Getting Started: Education and Race

This chapter discusses W. Arthur Lewis's early years growing up in the West Indies and studying and teaching in Great Britain, which left a deep imprint on him and shaped personality traits and intellectual activities that stayed with him throughout his life. The son of upwardly mobile school-teachers, he took advantage of the escape hatches that the West Indies system of education afforded to persons of exceptional intellectual merit. Unlike some of his peers, he did not allow the ferocious academic competition to gain a West Indian government scholarship or the many overt acts of racial discrimination and the daily routine of bias that his generation of young intellectuals experienced to rob him of his humanity. His mastery of a field of economic knowledge vital to the colonizers made him immensely attractive to the colonial elite. Yet he desperately wanted to use his skills to advance the cause of racial and political equality. Even at this early stage, Lewis's life abounded in contradictions and tensions, clearly manifested in his writings. He struggled to articulate a middle position between free market economics and the planned and regulated economies that were attracting political leaders and economists in many parts of the world.

The Colonial Office

This chapter examines W. Arthur Lewis's frequent contacts with the British Colonial Office from the late 1930s until 1953, first as a member of West Indian delegations seeking to alter the hiring policies of the British government and after that as an adviser and consultant on projects designed to promote colonial economic development. His work at the Colonial Office had been pivotal for his career as a development economist. During this decade and a half, he often found himself battling with the Colonial Office over development priorities. Despite the strained personal and intellectual relations with officials at the Colonial Office, Lewis's experiences with the Colonial Office provided privileged access to information on colonial economies and spurred his thinking and writing about development economics. Lewis first elaborated many of his most influential concepts in the field of economic development and staked out his reputation as the founder of development economics through the countless reports and memorandums that he wrote for the Colonial Office.