Ida Greaves: A Pioneer Development Economist 1032494395, 9781032494395

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Routledge Research in Gender and History

IDA GREAVES A PIONEER DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST Barbara Ingham

Ida Greaves

Ida Greaves, who was born in Barbados in 1907, is one of the “missing female voices” of early development economics. This biography, the first for Ida Greaves, attempts to construct her career and era before the past wholly disappears. The biography covers her early years in Barbados, her time at boarding school in England, at McGill University in Canada, where she focused on human behaviour under the influence of changing social and political histories and also published an early path-breaking study of Black migrants into Canada, and her later research at Harvard and Columbia in the United States and at the London School of Economics. Individual chapters follow her career acting as economic adviser to the Colonial Office in London, where she worked alongside Arthur Lewis, and at the fledgling United Nations in New York. She published in top journals and produced an outstanding study of the influence of colonial monetary systems on poor countries. This accessible biography provides unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period in late colonial history. The issues it raises of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment are of no less relevance today than they were in her lifetime. Barbara Ingham is an economist who has written extensively on development issues. Her research features the institutions in which development policy emerged from the 1930s onwards. She has co-authored the biography of a Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis and papers on Arthur Lewis and the Windrush Generation.

Routledge Research in Gender and History

1 Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c. 1870–1920 Laura Ugolini 2 Women and Scottish Society, 1700–2000 W.W.J. Knox 3 Cinematic Representations of Women in Modern Celebrity Culture, 1900–1950 Edited by María Cristina C. Mabrey and Leticia Pérez Alonso 4 Oral Histories of Tibetan Women Whispers from the Roof of the World Lily Xiao Hong Lee 5 Women in the French Enlightenment From Femme Savante to Mother of the Family Anna Maria Marchini 6 The Life and Turbulent Times of Clara Dorothea Rackham Suffragist, Socialist, and Social Reformer Maroula Joannou 7 Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe Women’s Periodicals and Salon Culture (1860–1920) Christina Bezari 8 Ida Greaves A Pioneer Development Economist Barbara Ingham For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Gender-and-History/book-series/SE0422

Ida Greaves A Pioneer Development Economist

Barbara Ingham

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Barbara Ingham The right of Barbara Ingham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Ingham, Barbara, author. Title: Ida Greaves : a pioneer development economist / Barbara Ingham. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge research in gender and history ; 50 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023122 (print) | LCCN 2023023123 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032494395 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032494401 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003393825 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000986419 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000986440 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Greaves, I. C. (Ida Cecil), 1907-1990. | Women economists

Great Britain

Biography. | Women economists

Barbados

 Biography. | Development economics

History. Classification: LCC HB103.G74 I64 2024 (print) | LCC HB103.G74 (ebook) | DDC 330.092 [B]

dc23/eng/20230608 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023122 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023123 ISBN: 978-1-032-49439-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-49440-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-39382-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Frontispiece Yearbook Photo of Ida Cecil Greaves. McGill University Archives, 1929 Yearbook, p. 139.

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements

viii ix xv

1

Early Education

1

2

The Lasting Legacy of McGill

9

3

Harvard, Bryn Mawr and the London School of Economics

30

4

Modern Production among Backward Peoples (1935)

42

5

American Interlude

54

6

The Colonial Office and LSE

64

7

Colonial Monetary Conditions

88

8

Towards a Conclusion Postscript: Ida Greaves: A Pioneer Development Economist? Appendix: The Currency Board Mechanism and the Sterling Area Bibliography Index

103

116 123 128 136

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2

3.1 3.2 P.1 A.1

Malvern Girls’ College Malvern Girls’ College, Front Entrance, from 1926 Prospectus. Courtesy of Malvern St James Yearbook Photo of Ida Cecil Greaves. McGill University Archives, 1929 Yearbook, p. 139 Yearbook Photo of Helen Elizabeth Archdale (Betty Archdale). McGill University Archives, 1929 Yearbook, p. 135 Suffragettes Near the London School of Economics in the 1920s. Courtesy of the LSE Library Professors Arnold Plant and Lionel Robbins. Courtesy of the LSE Library Timeline of Ida Greaves’s Career The Currency Board Mechanism (Circa 1950)

6 7 15

15 36 39 120 124

Preface

This is a biography in which both the personal and intellectual narratives are patchy. There are twists and turns, gaps and dead ends, and many unanswered questions. But even as it stands it is a story worth telling. It is an attempt to reconstruct a career and a particular era, before the past wholly disappears. Despite its limitations, it draws attention to the remarkable career of a little known female economist in the first half of the twentieth century. It provides the reader with some unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period of late colonial history. And the issues it raises, of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment, are no less relevant today than they were then. Its subject is Barbados-born economist Ida Cecil Greaves. She is known to me only through her remarkable books, articles and letters. To this I have been able to add what I have learned over a number of years about her early education in Barbados (she was born in Barbados, in St Michael parish in 1907), her years at boarding school in England, followed by student days first at McGill in Canada, then at Harvard and Bryn Mawr in the United States, and later in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). After teaching at colleges in the United States, she returned to London in 1943, taking up an advisory research appointment in the Colonial Office and a lectureship at LSE. She is perhaps best known today for her research on the colonial currency boards. I first discovered Ida Greaves’ work in the 1990s, when I was researching the history of the colonial monetary system. Ida Greaves (who had died in London in 1990 at the age of 83) had prepared reports on the colonial monetary system for the Colonial Office in London in the late 1940s. Her carefully researched work on colonial monetary systems was becoming better known by the 1990s and, as I discovered, was beginning to attract praise from academics. But this had not always been the case. Coming towards the end of her academic career, her reports and other publications on colonial monetary systems were controversial in

x Preface their day. For some critics in the establishment her approach was “anticolonial”. At the other end of the spectrum there were those who regarded her as an apologist for colonial exploitation. Much of Ida Greaves’ other writings, dating from the 1930s, on race and class, and on poverty and employment in developing countries, was largely ignored by these critics. Yet this earlier work is of high quality and has surprising resonance for the modern day reader. Unfortunately, apart from her books, articles, and a little known series of letters, there is only a very limited amount of information on the life of Ida Greaves on which a biography can be built. Even Barbadian academics currently compiling a dictionary of distinguished islanders have been hard pressed to provide much in the way of personal information on Ida Greaves. Certainly, I never met her in the course of my own career as a development economist. In fact, to the present day I have come across only one person who could remember meeting Ida Greaves. This was the late Phyllis Deane, a distinguished economist and historian, who recalled in an interview she gave me in 2006, that she had met Ida Greaves in Cambridge in the 1950s. So there are whole areas of Ida Greaves’ life and interests that are out of reach of the biographer, and for which there are now very few accessible point of reference. Records indicate that she travelled extensively between the 1920s and the 1950s, by sea of course, travelling to and from the Caribbean, to Britain, to Canada, to the United States, to South America and Africa. She researched and taught in the United States, Britain and the Caribbean and worked in the United Nations, where she connected with distinguished figures of the day. But the information comes from public records and the detail is lacking. Ida Greaves did not co-author books or papers, so it is impossible to identify colleagues who might have known or worked with her. Biography has to work with what is available, and to accept that some people are by nature very private. This may be the case with Ida Greaves. Or there may be other factors at play. I do not know. Lacking much in the way of personal information, the temptation is to concentrate solely on those books and articles which first introduced me to her work and to produce an intellectual biography. This would not do justice to the subject. The problem with intellectual biographies is that they tend to look for a progression of thought, for discernible intellectual change, whereas Ida Greaves worked in many directions, moving from her brilliant but little known 1930s historical study of the black fugitive slaves in Canada, to the highly technical accounts of the colonial monetary systems. There is a plurality of work and experience there which is difficult to capture as a progression of thought. More than this, although intellectual biographies have a valuable place in the history of ideas,

Preface

xi

when lacking any personal narrative they often do a disservice to their subject. This is especially the case for those like Ida Greaves, “missing voices” whose contribution may have been overlooked or undervalued. The biography is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1, Early Education, places Ida Greaves in Barbados, where she lived up until the age of 15, and later in England when she attended a prominent girls’ public school. There is very little information available on her family connections in the Caribbean, though we know from later papers that she was “white” and as was customary for all races at the time, was documented as a British passport holder born in the British West Indies. It is also possible that she had Jewish heritage. At the age of 15 she came to England, to board at Malvern Girls’ College in Worcestershire, a school popular with girl boarders from British colonial territories. By the 1920s, when Ida Greaves joined the Malvern Girls’ College, its academic reputation was growing. High flying students were seeking places at Oxford, Cambridge and London. Ida Greaves, though equally talented, did not follow this route. Unusually for the time she enrolled at McGill University in Canada for her undergraduate and masters studies. Chapter 2, The Lasting Legacy of McGill, is devoted to the years at McGill, which were clearly very important to her. McGill, where she graduated with the highest honours, was to have a significant influence on her later career as an economist. The Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill in which she studied both as an undergraduate and as a masters student was chaired at the time by Professor Stephen Leacock, a complex character better known nowadays for his best-selling humorous writings of the 1930s and 1940s. But he was also a serious economist, a theorist of the American institutionalist school who had studied at Chicago under Thorstein Veblen. Ida Greaves in her subsequent writings as an economist was to follow closely her teachers at McGill, focusing less on the immutable laws of the market, and more on human motivations under the influence of changing social, political and legal histories. It was at McGill that she went on to research her path-breaking masters thesis, which was later published as The Negro in Canada (1930). Her affections for McGill ran deep and were evidently long-lasting. Friends were made with feminists. She remembered women students at Victoria College in her Will, with a bequest which provides financial support to needy women students, available to the present day. Chapter 3, Harvard, Bryn Mawr and the London School of Economics, covers the years after graduation from McGill, which Ida Greaves spent both in the United States and in London. She held research and teaching fellowships at prestigious Radcliffe College (Harvard) and Bryn Mawr College in the United States, but neither institution seemed to offer what

xii

Preface

she was seeking. In 1932, she applied from Bryn Mawr for admission to the London School of Economics, and was accepted as a PhD (Econ) student under the supervision of Professor Arnold Plant. In London, in the early 1930s, she connected with many of the leading feminist activists who had been brought together by Margaret Haig Thomas (Lady Rhondda) and the Six Point Group. Chapter 4, Modern Production among Backward Peoples (1935), covers the doctoral thesis she produced at LSE, described as brilliant by her examiners. Undoubtedly, the two years she spent at LSE between 1932 and 1934 were highly successful academically. On the recommendation of her supervisor her thesis was published by Allen & Unwin in 1935 under the title Modern Production among Backward Peoples. In more recent years (1968) it was reprinted as an economics classic. It is a much neglected but remarkable pioneer study in the discipline of development economics, focusing on labour supply in plantations and peasant smallholdings in tropical areas, under a variety of social, political and legal influences. Also registered at LSE in 1933, though in his case on the undergraduate programme, was another student from the Caribbean. This was Arthur Lewis, a black student who arrived at LSE in September 1933 from St Lucia, a neighbouring island to Barbados in the East Caribbean. Arthur Lewis was eventually to receive universal recognition as development economist, and as a Nobel Prize winner in economics. There is no evidence that Lewis met Ida Greaves at LSE during his undergraduate degree studies between 1933 and 1936, but as we will see they were to work together as colleagues in the Colonial Office during the Second World War. Ida Greaves returned to the United States in 1936 when she had completed her doctoral studies at LSE. She was teaching at Iowa State College and at Barnard College, Colombia University, until the late 1930s. This period is covered in Chapter 5, American Interlude. Academic appointments were hard to come by in the states during the depression of the 1930s. Universities that relied on private funding were frequently in financial difficulties. The university teaching posts which Ida Greaves obtained were at a low level, not in keeping with her qualifications and experience. This aspect of her career recurs time and time again, in the United States, in London, and in the Caribbean. It raises questions about the way universities treated their distinguished female postgraduates. Nevertheless she continued with her research and publications, focusing on plantations and conditions of labour supply in colonial dependencies. It appears from official documents that she applied for naturalisation in the United States in 1940. Whether she decided not to proceed with the application or whether it was refused is unclear but she was back in

Preface

xiii

London by 1943, working as an economic adviser at the Colonial Office until 1945, alongside Arthur Lewis. No further appointments were on offer so she returned to Barbados in 1945, to live at the home of her father. She was recalled to London in 1948, to take up a teaching post at LSE, and resume her research at the Colonial Office. These years form the subject matter of Chapter 6, The Colonial Office and LSE. The reasons for Ida Greaves taking up a teaching appointment at LSE are interesting. The post came about indirectly through Arthur Lewis, and his promotion to a chair at University of Manchester. His proposed departure left LSE with a problem. Who was to provide the teaching required on his course for cadets in the colonial service? In June 1948, Carr Saunders, the LSE director, wrote to Ida Greaves in Barbados, asking for her help on the colonial economics course. Ida Greaves responded positively to the invitation and returned from Barbados to teach on the colonial economics course at LSE in 1948. Echoing her earlier disappointments in the United States, however, she was not considered for a permanent post when Lewis left. His vacated post as reader in colonial economics was never filled. Chapter 7, Colonial Monetary Conditions, is devoted to the research she carried out during this period, 1948–1950, into the colonial monetary system. It had been her long-standing ambition, dating from before the Second World War, to introduce a monetary dimension into studies of underdevelopment. She believed that this was a highly significant though much neglected feature of colonialism. She had studied money and banking with distinction, during her time at Harvard. Few if any development economists in the 1940s were as competent and motivated as she was, to take on the complexity of the currency board system which operated within the sterling area in Britain’s dependent empire. The outcome was her report on Colonial Monetary Systems published by HMSO in 1953. A note at the beginning made clear that the views expressed in it were entirely those of its author Ida Greaves and not of any government authority. Chapter 8, Towards a Conclusion, covers the period from 1953 until the 1960s when Ida Greaves effectively retired from academic life. The 1950s was a period in which she was heavily criticised, both from the left and the right, for the approach she took in her work on the colonial currency boards. She was a doughty fighter, and responded to criticism with an impressive publications record in leading journals. There were articles on currency systems, on trade and payments and on central banking in developing countries, in top journals such as The Journal of Political Economy, The Economic Journal and The American Economic Review. But it is not easy to set these publications in context and they were poorly received at the time within the academic community.

xiv

Preface

There were brief periods in the 1950s which she spent in the West Indies and in universities in the United States and Britain, but it is difficult to trace out the trajectory of her career. The lowest point must have been the paper she delivered in Puerto Rico in 1957 at a major international conference on plantations. By all accounts, it was received by her audience at the time with incomprehension and dismay. This biography argues that the work of Ida Greaves has not received the attention it deserves in the history of economic thought. It is true that certain academics, exceptionally, have recognised her unique contribution. The foremost Caribbean economist George Beckford in his classic 1972 book, Persistent Poverty, included her alongside many distinguished writers in the Caribbean radical tradition such as Eric Williams and Lloyd Best. More recently her work has been recognised as a major contribution to ongoing debates about the merits of currency boards in the present day, operating as a stabilising factor in failing economies. Nevertheless, despite these marks of recognition, Ida Greaves has not been privileged with inclusion in the ranks of “pioneer” development economists. It is hoped that her biography may go some way towards rectifying this omission. Barbara Ingham

Acknowledgements

I discussed the career of Ida Greaves with a number of people over many years. Especial thanks are due to Mark Figueroa, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of West Indies, Jamaica. Professor Figueroa was responsible for drawing my attention to the role of Ida Greaves in what has come to be known as the Plantation School in Caribbean economic thought. Paul Mosley, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Sheffield, is a collaborator of many years’ standing. He shares my interest in early development economics, and was co-author of our biography of Arthur Lewis (2013). I greatly benefitted from discussions with two women who were involved in development economics in the 1940s namely Dr Gisela Eisner who authored a pioneering book (1961) on Jamaica, and Phyllis Deane, who published early work on national income estimates for the colonies. I was fortunate to speak with Phyllis Deane on two occasions in Cambridge, to discuss a number of themes developed in this biography. Professor Fiona Carmichael of the University of Birmingham, an authority on feminist economics, provided the encouragement which was critical in getting this biography into print. Rebecca Ingham investigated and documented the many journeys made by Ida Greaves from the Caribbean to Canada, Britain, the United States, South America and Africa. Jennifer Morris painstakingly dealt with the correspondence of Arnold Plant and others in the London School of Economics archives. The LSE archivists deserve acknowledgement, as do the archivists at Bryn Mawr and Malvern St James, and senior archivist Yves Lapointe at McGill University Archives. All have been unfailingly helpful and welcoming.

1

Early Education

Given her later writings, it seems highly unlikely that Ida Greaves was unaware of the social and economic problems of Barbados when she left for England in 1923 at the age of 15. Barbados, the country in which she had grown up, was still a “settler” economy in the early twentieth century. Dating from the seventeenth century, settlers from Britain had taken on land to cultivate tobacco and cotton, using white indentured labour. Indentured labour was later replaced by African slave labour for the cultivation a new crop, sugar. By the start of the eighteenth century the slave society in Barbados was well established, numbering tens of thousands of black slaves employed on sugar plantations and working in subsistence agriculture and as domestic servants. Politically, Barbados had started out as a self-governing colony with a narrow electorate based on property and race. At the top were the white planters, who were supported by a small white middle class comprising professionals such as merchants, lawyers and the clergy. The franchise, based on property and race, was self-evidently unrepresentative, especially after Emancipation. The Crown Colony system was introduced into Barbados from London in 1875, in the face of strong opposition from the Barbados planters. Under the Crown Colony system, a Governor and a Legislative Council for Barbados were appointed directly by the Crown. The system was intended to support the broader interests of the disenfranchised black majority. But with strict property qualifications still in force for the franchise, it was inevitable that white planter interests would continue to dominate the Legislature as they did well into the 1950s. In the 1920s, therefore, when Ida Greaves left Barbados for England, the “plantocracy” was still in control. Social unrest among the disenfranchised black majority had festered throughout the nineteenth century and there were sporadic outbreaks of violence rooted in the high levels of poverty and unemployment in the black population. The situation worsened when the sugar price collapsed dramatically in 1921. By the 1930s, with plummeting world prices for primary products, serious discontent DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-1

2 Early Education involving rioting and strikes spread throughout the Caribbean. It reached Barbados from St Kitts and Trinidad, and then moved rapidly out from the capital, Bridgetown, into the rural districts. Hundreds were arrested after riots in 1937, and many were subsequently imprisoned. There were, however, some positive aspects of life in Barbados in the early decades of the twentieth century, notably in education. The high status of education in present-day Barbados has a long history dating back to the early colonial period. In 1686, two wealthy planters, John Elliot and Rowland Bulkeley, donated land and £1,000 towards the establishment of a charity school for the education of the children of poor whites. These children were the descendents of the early indentured white labour force, which had been supplemented on occasion by transports of convicted criminals and prisoners of war from Cromwell’s Irish adventures. As time went on, the economic condition of the poor whites deteriorated and a number of charity schools were set up for their benefit, operated by the clergy and funded by missionary societies and well-to-do philanthropic individuals. But before Emancipation (1834), such schools were closed to slaves and their children. There were no attempts to educate the children of slaves, who continued to speak the diverse African languages of the regions from which their parents had been transported. Moves to provide the children of slaves with the “elements of education” came only after 1834. Saturday Schools, Sunday Schools and Estate Schools began to provide the rudiments of knowledge to the children of slaves, focusing exclusively on the three Rs and religious education. The majority of charity schools were Anglican (Church of England) foundations but there was also a small number of Moravian and Wesleyan foundations, all providing education to the poorer classes in Barbados. Fees, at a very low level, were usually levied on pupils. From the 1880s onwards, the Barbados Legislature took over the responsibility for funding public elementary education. From the outset, there were many well-documented problems with the public elementary schools, ranging from deficiencies in the curriculum to inadequate facilities and poorly trained teachers. These shortcomings persisted in publicly funded education into the immediate post-colonial era. Significantly, it was the majority of the population, comprising poor blacks, which depended on public provision, and received at best a minimal level of education. Alongside schools dependent on public or church funding, were a large number of private schools wholly financed by fees for pupils. By the late-nineteenth century, private schools were educating more than 10,000 children in Barbados. The private schools in Barbados were not inspected, and the quality of the education on offer was highly variable. Nevertheless, the number of pupils educated in the private schools was quite remarkable.

Early Education

3

The private education system in Barbados, which Ida Greaves experienced up to the age of 15, closely followed the British class system, modified by colour. At the top were the colonial administrators, financiers, wealthy merchants and planters who would as a matter of course ignore local provision and send their children overseas at the age of 8 for their education. Particularly in the case of boys, they would be enrolled in English fee-paying private schools, first at preparatory level and then, at the age of 13, admitted to the independent fee-paying “public” schools. The less well-off middle class in Barbados, which included white, mixed race and black professionals, came to rely heavily on the local private schools, which were segregated both by income and colour. Indeed the segregation of children by colour was a feature of Barbados education right through to the 1950s but it was little remarked upon. The growing black middle classes were keen to take advantage of increasing educational opportunities in the twentieth century, whether in private or in publicly funded schools. Consider, for example, the career of Ruth Nita Barrow, born in 1916 in St Lucy, Barbados. She was one of five children. Her father was among the pioneer black Anglican ministers who trained in theology at Codrington College in Barbados in the early 1900s. The family had a strong radical tradition. Nita Barrow’s brother Erroll became the first prime minister of independent Barbados in 1966, leading the Democratic Labour Party. Like many black middle class families at the time, the Barrows had low expectations of the publicly funded elementary schools. Nita Barrow initially attended a small private fee-paying school in Bridgetown, exclusively for black girls. In 1928, she enrolled as one of the first pupils at the newly opened St Michaels Girls’ School in Bridgetown, a publicly funded grammar school for girls, which was open to black pupils. There she sat for the Cambridge School Certificate, and followed a career in nursing. Nursing and teaching were the only careers open to talented and educated black women in Barbados in the 1930s. Even banking and the civil service were closed to them. But making full use of her nursing opportunities and radical connections in the Caribbean, Nita Barrow went on to hold many important international posts in her lifetime and was appointed as the first female Governor General of Barbados. How were white middle class pupils like Ida Greaves educated? On her application form for Higher Degree Studies at LSE, submitted in October 1932, she supplied only the briefest of information in answer to the question about her school education prior to travelling to England to take up a place at Malvern Girls’ College. Her information on the form simply reads “Barbados 1914–1922”, with no school named or honours listed. I had assumed at first, wrongly as it turned out, that she had been educated at home as was quite common at the time for girls from better-off families.

4 Early Education But quite by chance I came across a reference to Ida Greaves’ schooldays in Barbados. This was in the history of St Winifred’s School in Barbados. That school still thrives today, as a private government-assisted school open to all, but in Ida Greaves’ time, it was an exclusive school for white girls. The reference to Ida Greaves at St Winifred’s comes in the Report of a Prize Day in 1924. By that date, Ida Greaves had already left for England, but she was highly commended in the 1924 Report as the first recipient of a newly donated silver medal for outstanding academic achievements. The Report also implies that she had previously attended Grassfield School. This was a school which was closed in the early 1920s when the site was adapted to become the newly opened St Michaels, the school which went on to educate Nita Barrow. Occupying a property once owned by a wealthy plantation family, Grassfield had been bought out by the Vestry (local authority) to provide a publicly funded school for black pupils. Grassfield’s private pupils including Ida Greaves were then transferred to a new private school for white girls, named St Winifred’s. Both St Michaels and St Winifred’s went on in later years to enjoy a high academic reputation with pupils entered for the Cambridge Senior Certificates. Generally speaking, headmistress and staff were appointed from England, as was the norm at that time. But it was a highly segregated education system which Ida Greaves left behind when she sailed to England in 1923. There is no doubt that she was aware throughout her life, of the advantages she had enjoyed from the education provided by St Winifred’s. Sixty years later, she remembered the small school in Barbados with a substantial legacy in her Will. For her secondary education, Ida Greaves sailed from Barbados to New York, then embarked on the liner “Orduna” out of New York for Southampton. As far as we can judge, she travelled alone. The “Orduna” was operated by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. It was a relatively new one-class Cabin Liner which boasted luxury items such as dining rooms with “tempting menus”, lounges with music, a ballroom and promenades.1 We can assume that the schoolgirl Ida Greaves travelled in some comfort. The liner docked at Southampton on September 18 in time for the start of the new academic year at Malvern Girls’ College, one of a large number of boarding schools located in Malvern at that time. Malvern had a number of advantages for pupils from overseas. It was noted for its healthy climate, there were large villas to rent for accommodation and cities like London, Manchester and Liverpool were accessible by train in three hours. The private boarding schools in Malvern were often family businesses. Many were quite small with their owners having little in the way of formal teaching qualifications. The schools for boys were mostly preparatory institutions, with a formal curriculum

Early Education

5

which prepared boys for entry examinations to independent fee-paying “public” schools at the age of 13. Boarding schools for girls were fewer in number and tended to be smaller establishments. They offered a less rigorous education and the age ranges of the girl pupils were very flexible, with infants to young ladies of eighteen or more often educated in the same school.2 Private boarding schools in Malvern flourished until the 1930s. Then, with the demands of a more rigorous curriculum and falling numbers, many of the smaller establishments were forced to close or to merge with others. An important factor contributing to a fall in pupil numbers from the 1950s onwards was decolonisation.The private boarding schools had always drawn significant numbers of pupils from the colonies: families of military officers, colonial administrators, merchants and clergy. In the case of boys, it was often the case that extended families, particularly from the smaller Caribbean islands such as St Vincent, sent all the brothers, cousins, second and third cousins even, to the same preparatory boarding school in Malvern for their education. Some of the owners of the boarding schools had themselves strong colonial connections. An early proprietor of the school Ida Greaves attended in Malvern came from a family of sugar planters in Guiana. The school for which Ida Greaves was destined in 1923 was not one of those Malvern establishments which later ran into financial problems and was forced to close. Malvern Girls’ College was a school which had undergone something of a renaissance in the twentieth century. By the 1920s, it was widely recognised for its high academic standards. Although it still offered the traditional secretarial and domestic science subjects to girls, there were academic courses at the sixth-form level which prepared pupils for public examinations and university entrance. Increasingly university graduates were employed as teachers at the College, and there is an intriguing reference in a history of the College to the teaching of economics at sixth-form level in the 1920s, which would have been highly unusual at any school at that time, not least in a girls’ private boarding school.3 When Ida Greaves joined the College in 1923, there were around 400 boarders of whom about 50 were girls arriving from the colonies, from families of English or Scottish descent. They came from the British West Indies, including Barbados and Jamaica, from Rhodesia, India, Ceylon and Burma. The College had a sound academic reputation, but significantly it also offered the exclusive education required by the British professional and upper middle class families on which it drew in the 1920s. Life at the school was permeated by an overweening class system. For example, no pupil whose family was “in the retail business” was likely to be offered a place. And not until 1937 was the first pupil indigenous to a

6 Early Education

Figure 1.1 Malvern Girls’ College.

colony, in this case a girl of Indian descent, offered a place. Even then the event was so remarkable that it was discussed and minuted in the School Council proceedings. The education of all the girls, even those who had academic aspirations, was designed in the expectation that eventually they would live in and preside over large households with extensive domestic staff. Figures 1.1. and 1.2 show the prestigeous buildings occupied by Malvern Girls’ College when Ida Greaves arrived in 1923. The three women founders had purchased Malvern’s Grand Imperial Hotel four years earlier in 1919, and had adapted the building to school use. It confirmed to the general public that the Girls’ College was no longer one of Malvern’s little schools, but was equal in status to any of the great pioneering girls’ boarding schools in England at that time There is really no way of knowing how Ida Greaves, newly arrived from colonial Barbados in 1923, responded to the exclusive social environment of an English girls’ boarding school in the 20s. Her university destination, McGill in Canada, and choice of degree, Economics and Political Science, would seem to suggest someone of independent mind, even radical sympathies. Certainly this would be consistent with her path-breaking masters thesis on the blacks migrants in Canada. But things are rarely so simple. In the Barbados which she left, ideas of white privilege which had dominated the colony for at least 300 years were firmly entrenched. Admittedly, they were already being questioned by some of the more progressive individuals within the white elites. The Gladstonian Liberal, Charles Clark, had been

Early Education

7

Figure 1.2 Malvern Girls’ College, Front Entrance, from 1926 Prospectus. Courtesy of Malvern St James.

appointed Attorney General in 1913 and Clark came to epitomise the reformist voice in the Executive, calling for broader representation and progress in welfare issues of health and education. It is possible that as a schoolgirl Ida Greaves was open to these reformist ideas, but whether at this early stage in her career she rejected the class-based mores of her English boarding school education, is another question.

8 Early Education Notes 1 Information on the facilities aboard the liner “Orduna” comes from a novel introduction, the advertising brochure, produced by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1923 which co- incidentally was the year of Ida Greave’s embarkation from New York. It was one of the earliest travel brochures and contains numerous interior photographs guaranteed to attract the better-off customers on the competitive transatlantic route. 2 A comprehensive account of the many boarding schools in Malvern from the mid-nineteenth century onwards can be found in the history section of the local website. There were as many as 40 boarding schools established over time, mostly small but a few relatively large, and the extensive website provides photographs and information on the school life of staff and pupils. Most of the smaller schools have now closed, or have merged to form larger ones. 3 The reference comes in Pamela Hurle’s Centenary History of the College ( 1993). By the 1920s, girls were winning scholarships and exhibitions to universities. The College had particular strengths in mathematics and science, history, economics and music.

Reference Hurle, Pamela (1993) Malvern Girls’ College, A Centenary History, Chichester, Phillimore & Co Ltd

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In the 1920s it was unusual for a girl educated at an English boarding school to choose to study economics at university, even more remarkable to travel to a Canadian university to fulfil this ambition. At Malvern Girls’ College the favoured destination of the most talented pupils was Oxford or Cambridge, notwithstanding the fact that Oxford did not formally confer degrees on women until the 1920s, and even later, after World War II, in the case of Cambridge. In the 1920s too, it was rare for students from outside Canada to enrol at Canadian universities. At McGill the majority of students, male and female, came from within Canada itself, and even more locally from Quebec. That being said, for a student from Barbados the choice of McGill could arise indirectly out of long-standing economic and political ties between Canada and British West Indies. There could well be family or business connections with Barbados. Canada was a major market for Barbados sugar. Steamship lines and railways with expansive geographical networks stretched south from Canada to the islands of the Caribbean. The Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia and insurance companies such as Sun Life of Canada, maintained a strong presence in colonial Barbados. Indeed, from the last decades of the nineteenth century up until World War I there was pressure for a more formal political union between the colonial dependencies of the West Indies, and Canada, which had Dominion status in the Empire. Supporters for a political union came from both Canada and the Caribbean. The prime movers were elite groups of sugar planters, financiers, merchants and investors, together with politicians of all persuasions. The movement was underpinned by a belief, erroneous as it turned out, that London would be only too willing to unload its troublesome and expensive Caribbean dependencies on the Dominion to the north. By the time that Ida Greaves joined McGill in 1926, however, support for a formal political union between Canada and the British West Indies was in full retreat. A significant factor in its demise was the troubled history of race relations in Canada, a topic which was to gain the attention DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-2

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of Ida Greaves in her masters thesis at McGill. Black migrants had entered Canada in numbers in the nineteenth century, as refugee slaves from the United States. Then in the following decades, they were joined by increasing numbers of free migrants, black workers arriving in Canada from the Caribbean, taking up jobs as labourers or domestic servants. Although black migrants faced very little in the way of formal discriminatory legislation in Canada, in practice there was extensive discrimination, segregation and social exclusion. It became painfully clear that the white majority in Canada had little appetite for engaging politically or socially with the black migrants arriving from dependent West Indian colonies to the south. Furthermore, as knowledge of Canada’s discriminatory environment spread, London was obliged to distance itself from the movement for political union, making known its own opposition to increasing Canadian involvement in the Caribbean. Finally, as pressures increased for selfgovernment in the colonies, politicians who were leading the growing nationalist movements in the colonial dependencies made clear their own unwillingness to countenance any formal political arrangements between the British West Indies and Canada. McGill, Ida Greaves’ chosen university, was located in Montreal. By the 1920s Montreal was a booming city at the heart of Canada, attracting migrants from all continents. It had the largest grain port in the world, devoted to the export of Canadian wheat. There were traditional industries such as textiles and iron and steel, and newer sectors such as those based on oil. Important innovations were underway in the electronics industry and many substantial building projects and public works were in progress. Finance played a major role with the largest Canadian banks having their headquarters in Montreal. The Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway had their headquarters in Montreal. Montreal also had its downside, from which McGill students would be largely sheltered. The city had extensive networks of organised crime, violence and corruption. It was a highly segregated city, with the poor French-speaking population occupying the east of the St Laurent River, and the more prosperous English-speaking population to the west. The religious divides were unbridgeable, French-speaking Catholics were in the east, and English-speaking Protestants in the west. Jewish immigrants formed a third group, and were themselves segregated socially between a small number of long-settled wealthy individuals who had migrated to Canada from the United States and Britain, and the large majority of migrants who were poor and uneducated. These tended to be the more recent arrivals escaping persecution in continental Europe. The black community in Montreal was small in comparison with other parts of Canada, but its poverty and widespread experience of brutal racism set it apart from its neighbours.

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 11 McGill University in Montreal had been established as a college with a bequest from a Scottish merchant, James McGill, in 1813. It remained what was essentially a private university until the 1950s, having minimal government funding. The major benefactors of the University were Canadian manufacturers and financiers, and the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. Students at McGill came largely from white, middle-class English-speaking families. There were significant numbers of women students who were separately accommodated in the Royal Victoria College, opened in 1899. Initially, male and female students had been taught in separate classes, though this practice had been abandoned by the 1920s. But petty restrictions on women students remained even in Ida Greaves’ time. For example, women were barred from running for the Student Council, and even women who were studying political economy were barred from joining the Political Economy Club. One consequence of McGill’s heavy dependence on support from industry and commerce was the highly conservative culture of its board of governors. The authorities were known to be especially sensitive to the political views of the benefactors, and university staff suspected of leftish views came under increasing pressure. Undoubtedly the driver was a fear of communism, circulating widely in North America in the 1920s and 1930s. In appraising its staff the University had a tendency to blur the distinction between communists and others of a radical persuasion such as socialists, outspoken liberals and civil libertarians. The Department of Economics and Political Science in which Ida Greaves was to enrol was kept under close scrutiny. It included two senior academics, Fursey and Marsh, who were of special concern to the University authorities, though neither could be described as communists. Both were socialists and at least in Marsh’s case, a very moderate socialism firmly rooted in the Fabian tradition.1 The Department of Economics and Political Science was chaired in the 1920s and 1930s by Professor Stephen Leacock, often described as “mercurial” in character, and in post at McGill from 1903 to 1936. His was the major influence on the type of institutional economics which would be studied at McGill by Ida Greaves. Stephen Leacock had a dual career as writer and academic. He is best remembered today as the popular humorist writer of the inter-war period, achieving fame for his novels first in Canada and the United States, and then throughout the Englishspeaking world. They were gentle satires on everyday life which inspired a number of celebrated comedians, including Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx. As an economist, however, he is appropriately described by a modern admirer as “a forgotten man … not cited by economists. He left no Leacock school, no Leacock theory, no Leacock effect, nor is there even a catch phrase associated with his name, such as Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption … ”2

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Leacock was not a Canadian by birth but was born in Southampton, England. And there were colonial connections. His grandfather had retired to the Isle of Wight having made his fortune from his plantations producing wines in Madeira. Leacock’s own parents migrated to Canada when Stephen, their third child, was six years old. The father subsequently abandoned his family, and Stephen’s education was funded by his grandfather who recognised his talent. He graduated in Modern Languages from the University of Toronto in 1891 and his study of economics began in 1899 as a postgraduate when he enrolled on the PhD programme at University of Chicago, under the supervision of Thorstein Veblen. His PhD titled “The Doctrine of Laissez-Faire” was awarded (magna cum laude) in 1903, the year he took up his post at McGill. A working definition of “institutionalist economics” is that it stresses the role of evolving institutions in shaping economic behaviour. It rejects the standard utility and profit-maximising models of neo-classical economics, with their equilibrium solutions. The economics taught at McGill in Ida Greaves’ time, reflected the views of Stephen Leacock’s Chicago mentors, Veblen and Laughlin, in that it was rooted in the institutionalist school of thought and not in the orthodox neo-classical and (later) Keynesian theories current in the leading English universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London. In the United States and Canada, it was institutionalist economics which was in the ascendancy at the time. It had taken the lead and remained there, at least up until the 1940s.3 Institutionalist economics covers a diversity of approaches. Veblen, a very early proponent, stressed the wasteful status-driven “conspicuous consumption” of the leisured classes. Present-day behavioural economists in the same tradition draw inspiration from the emerging discipline of cognitive science. In both cases, the role of institutions in shaping economic behaviour is the key, but what constitutes “institutions” is an open question. In its broadest interpretation, institutionalist economics takes on the character of political economy in which economic decision-making is considered to be strongly influenced by politics and the social structure. Hence the study of economics cannot be separated from politics and the social system. “Political economy” therefore would be a plausible description of the discipline which Ida Greaves had elected to study at McGill. The foundation course for aspiring economists was “Elements of Political Economy” based on John Stuart Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy”. Leacock’s own text, “The Elements of Political Science” complemented his lectures, a book incidentally which turned out to be an international best seller for him. At the heart of the discipline as taught at McGill was public policy, what governments ought, and ought not to do. It was a philosophy to which Ida Greaves subscribed, throughout her academic career.

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 13 Leacock is often described as being on the right politically, but he was more complex than that. He described himself as “a Liberal Conservative, or if you will a Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of sympathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour, and a believer in Progressive Radicalism”. He was a strong supporter of laissez-faire where domestic industry was concerned, but paradoxically no champion of freedom in the international sphere where he favoured Empire trade and an Empire super tariff to counteract US economic hegemony. Leacock also departed significantly from his colleagues on the right in relation to income distribution. His book “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice” (1920) argued that the “freedom” achieved by market forces alone, brings no real freedom and no real justice. In democratic market economies, intrusive social legislation is the only way to prevent injustice. His arguments for extensive intervention to secure social benefits such as minimum wages, child welfare and education, better housing, health and nutrition, and vastly improved employment opportunities, would be consistent with an agenda followed in the coming years by many development economists, including Ida Greaves herself.4 So how did Ida Greaves respond to undergraduate life at McGill in the 1920s, and more particularly to the economics on offer in Stephen Leacock’s Department? No first-hand diaries or letters of hers survive from her time at McGill, no personal recollections or reminiscences about her student days. However, she must have had good memories of McGill, recognising her debt to the University in a Bursary which she bequeathed in her Will, in 1992. In the list of undergraduate scholarships and awards, tenable at McGill University, there is the Ida Greaves Bursary “to provide financial assistance to students in any faculty who are residents of Royal Victoria College”.5 There are also some insights into her undergraduate days because they are recalled in the biography (2002) of her friend and contemporary at Royal Victoria College, Elizabeth (Betty) Archdale.6 Their friendship also opens up a fascinating link for Ida Greaves with the suffragette movement of the early twentieth century. Betty Archdale (1907–2000) was born in London and educated at St Leonards, a girls’ public school in Scotland. She was the daughter of the prominent suffragette Helen Alexander Archdale and was brought up in suffragette circles; her godmother was Emmeline Pankhurst. After the early death of her father Betty Archdale moved with her widowed mother to live at the Chelsea home of the leading feminist of the day, Lady Rhondda. Betty Archdale went on in the 1930s to become an active socialist, working as part-time private secretary in London to the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. Betty Archdale’s decision to travel to Canada to study at McGill in the 1920s apparently was influenced by her brother, who was then in his

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second year at the Canadian university studying forestry. Her choice of degree was Economics and Political Science, a programme on which she and Ida Greaves were the only female students. They were also among the very small number of students enrolled at McGill from outside Canada. According to Betty Archdale’s biographer, the two women were drawn together by their mutual interest in economics and they became great friends. Economics lectures provided by Stephen Leacock were popular with both of them, as a lecturer he was often controversial but never dull. Both women gained first-class honours in their final degrees in 1929. Ida Greaves was awarded the Montreal Manufacturers’ Graduate Fellowship. Betty Archdale was offered the Governor’s Graduate Fellowship in Economics. In later years Betty Archdale told her biographer that Leacock “had been rocked by two women doing honours and topping the course”. Initially, however, both women declined their awards being reluctant to stay on as graduates. They believed postgraduate studies would lead inevitably to a career in teaching. Neither of them wanted to become teachers, one of the few career opportunities open to women graduates at that time. Betty Archdale decided to return to London and enrolled at the University of London on a law degree, specialising in international law. Ida Greaves changed her mind and was persuaded to stay on at McGill, accepting the offer of a scholarship to study for a masters degree by research in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. They were to meet up again in London in the early 1930s (Chapter 3). The Yearbook, Old McGill, 1925–1929, from which Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are taken, photographs and short pen portraits of undergraduates enrolled at McGill between those dates. It is a rare archive resource, which includes photographs of Ida Cecil Greaves and her contemporaries such as Betty Archdale, at both junior and senior levels, (third and fourth-year undergraduates) at McGill.7 The pen portraits are mostly light-hearted, and clearly authored by their subjects. In her junior year, Ida Greaves describes her hobbies as “eating, arguing and scrapping”. But there is a serious element to the entries in the Yearbook. The junior pen portraits, for example, are all headed by selected poetry extracts. Ida Greaves chooses a serious extract from Milton’s lyric poem, L’Allegro, in which the poet calls on Melancholy to leave him, as he welcomes the first day of spring, and calls on the goddess Euphrosyne to bring him joy and happiness. And at senior level, her junior year hobby of “arguing and scrapping” was replaced by her official designation as Intercollegiate Debater. On graduation, the Jewish Telegraph Agency named Ida Greaves as being one of a significant number of Jewish graduates gaining high honours at McGill. The Agency singled out the Faculty of Arts in which she graduated as having the largest number of scholarships and medals awarded to Jewish

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 15

Figure 2.1 Yearbook Photo of Ida Cecil Greaves. McGill University Archives, 1929 Yearbook, p. 139.

students.8 In the early years of the twentieth century McGill University was widely known to be a favoured destination for Jewish students, in particular for Montreal’s poorer Ashkenazi migrants from Eastern Europe seeking upward mobility through education. Enrolment of Jewish undergraduates at McGill rose from 6.8% in 1913 to 25% in 1924. The authorities at McGill, keen to preserve the Anglophone ethos of the University, viewed its

Figure 2.2 Yearbook Photo of Helen Elizabeth Archdale (Betty Archdale). McGill University Archives, 1929 Yearbook, p. 135.

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increasing popularity with the Jewish community as a matter of concern. In 1926, the year that Ida Greaves enrolled at McGill, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts recommended that the proportion of Jewish students in his Faculty should be limited to 20%. Measures were speedily introduced across all faculties in the University requiring qualifying grades of 70% for Jewish applicants, as opposed to 60% for non-Jewish applicants.9 By 1935 the requirements had stiffened. The infamous quota brought a significant decline in Jewish enrolment at McGill. Arts enrolment declined from 24% in 1926 to 12% in 1935; over the same period in Medicine from 15% to 12%; and in Law from 40% to 15%. Unsurprisingly given the hostility of McGill’s administration, when it came to academic appointments the university declined to offer any places to displaced Jewish academics from Germany in the 1930s, even on Appeal. I have been unable to find any other reference in the documents to Ida Greaves’ Jewish heritage, so it remains an open question. Jews had arrived in Barbados from Brazil as early as the mid-seventeenth century. They were Sephardic Jews, fleeing persecution in Brazil after it had been recaptured by the Portuguese from the Dutch. Jews in Brazil had extensive experience of cultivating and trading in coffee and sugar. Their subsequent contribution to the development of the sugar industry in Barbados is without question. Although they did not own plantations, they were responsible for many of the important technological improvements in sugar milling. They were also able to put their extensive overseas trading contacts to good advantage in their dealings with foreign merchants. As time went on the Jewish refugees from Brazil were joined by Jewish settlers from England and Holland, similarly attracted by the opportunities offered by the sugar industry in Barbados. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, however, the population of Jews in Barbados began to decline. A significant factor in the decline was emigration to the booming economies of the United States and Canada. Assimilation was another factor. Interestingly the first premier of independent Barbados, Errol Barrow, himself claimed Jewish heritage through his great grandfather who was a descendent of the Barbados Jewish family of Baruh Lousadas. Ida Greaves likewise may have had Jewish ancestry. If this were the case, it may have played a role in her choice of McGill and Montreal for her university education, a place where there was a significant Jewish community. Despite the hesitation recorded in Betty Archdale’s biography, her friend Ida Greaves stayed on at McGill to study for her masters degree. It was a one-year programme of research which she started on graduation in 1929, and completed in 1930. The year was funded by the award of the Montreal Manufacturers’ Graduate Fellowship. The thesis was supervised by Stephen Leacock and H. Kemp, and was one of three theses submitted

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 17 from the Department of Economics and Political Science in 1930. Of the three, only Ida Greaves’ was specifically attributed to Economics. Today’s economists might prefer to place the thesis within the orbit of economic history, but this was a study supervised by Leacock at McGill and without doubt its pedigree was institutionalist economics. Understandably some might question how much scholarly influence Leacock had over the MA thesis which Ida Greaves subsequently produced. Leacock was well known both for his hostility towards nonEuropean immigration into Canada, and for his dismissive attitudes towards women. He was unsupportive of wider educational opportunities for women, even opposing the extension of the franchise to them. At first sight, these attitudes sit uneasily with a thesis produced by a talented female student, which drew attention to the widespread discrimination suffered by blacks in Canada. Leacock, however, was a man of many parts.10 As far as women were concerned, he could in practice be generous and supportive. He funded his sister’s education and she went on to become one of the first female physicians in Canada. He provided financially for his niece’s education, from bachelors through to masters level. So there is every reason to believe that in practice Leacock in his role as senior supervisor would be very supportive of Ida Greaves. The extent to which he specifically guided and directed her thesis, and in particular whether he sympathised with her approach to racial discrimination, must remain an open question. The inspiration for Ida Greaves’ thesis is most likely to be found in the work of two Canadian historians, one is Fred Landon and the other is W.R. Riddell. Both were “part-time” historians in the sense that Riddell was in profession as a lawyer, specifically as a judge in the Supreme Court in Ontario. Landon, the better-known of the two, was chief librarian based at the University of Western Ontario. They remain to this day wellrespected writers, with an appeal to both academic and popular audiences. Both writers were acknowledged in Ida Greaves’ thesis, reference being made to their articles which appeared independently in the Journal of Negro History, in the early years of the twentieth century. Landon and Riddell were the pioneers of their day, writing on littleknown aspects of African-Canadian history and drawing attention to the experiences of the black communities established in Canada from the seventeenth century onwards. Originating from a wide geographic area which covered Africa, the West Indies and the United States, Canada’s black communities comprised people whose origins were as slaves, refugees and migrants. Scholarly articles covered topics such as Canada’s role in the Abolition Movement; black migration to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Act; and the Underground Railroad which drew slaves from the US to freedom in Canada’s promised land.11

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No doubt these pioneering historical studies were available to the social science students at McGill. Ida Greaves with her Barbadian background may well have had a particular interest in the history of the black Caribbean communities of Quebec and Ontario. It is certainly the case that Landon himself came to know of Ida Greaves’ work. He went on to review her masters thesis when it was published in 1931 by the PacketTimes Press in Orillia, Ontario. Orillia was where Stephen Leacock had his home on the banks of Lake Conchiching, and where his Museum is located in the present day. It is reasonable to assume that Leacock himself may well have had some influence on the publication of the thesis by the Packet-Times Press in Orillia. Though Landon and Riddell are widely applauded in Canada today as early scholars of black Canadian history they are not without their critics.12 The focus of the criticism is the observation that black Canadians have tended to be relegated to an essentially passive role in much of Canada’s pioneer historical writings. The individuals who were the drivers of positive change are assumed to come from “outside” of the black community. Typically they would be well-disposed writers, politicians, lawyers and clerics drawn from the white professional middle classes. The role of the black communities themselves, and their leaders, is very much understated. To the modern reader, both Landon’s and Riddell’s writings have this characteristic period flavour. Ida Greaves’ thesis published a generation later in the inter-war years, largely though not entirely escapes this trap. Landon’s Review of Ida Greaves’ book The Negro in Canada based on her masters thesis can be found in the Canadian Historical Review in 1932.13 He described her work as “worthy of serious consideration” because she showed “how negroes in Canada had been virtually excluded from the more lucrative occupations” and how “the present century [had] brought a marked shrinkage in their field of employment” (op. cit., p. 218). Landon in his own writings did not pursue the implications of the widespread discrimination in employment endured by the black communities in Canada. In this respect Ida Greaves, looking at discrimination through the eyes of an economist trained in the institutional tradition, took early research on the black communities in Canada in a new direction. The opening chapters of her thesis are devoted to the history of black migration into Canada. Although most of the historical material draws on existing studies such as those of Landon and Riddell, it is brought together in support of the hypothesis that the end of slavery was only the beginning of problems for the majority of blacks in Canada. As the nineteenth century progressed, discriminatory economic and social relationships “closed the doors of opportunity” to black communities. The thesis opens with an explanation of the changes in the status of blacks when English forces conquered New France, that is the French

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 19 Canadian provinces of Quebec, Montreal and Trois Rivieres. Though slaves were not extensive in numbers, slavery had been a legally established institution in New France. But the conquest of New France by English forces brought a change in the legal status of slaves. The change was from slaves’ status based on French Roman law to that based on English civil law. This change did not benefit slaves. Because slavery was not legally established in Canada under English law, by default slaves lost their rights to be treated as human beings. Instead, they were identified as “chattel property” to be bought and sold, and counted as property, in satisfaction of debts. In practice, being black was prima facie evidence of being a slave and being black was to be identified as “chattel property”. This situation was reversed in Canada’s Slave Bills of the 1790s, which effectively made slavery unlawful in Canada. This was even before the Imperial Act of Abolition in 1833. By the date of Abolition, slavery as such was virtually extinct in Canada. The first black settlers who arrived in numbers in Canada were former American slaves who had fought on the English side in the Wars of 1776 and 1812. After the wars the freed slaves were promised “equal rights and privileges” with existing white settlers in Canada, but grants of land were slow to materialise. Settlements which were established tended to be located in the less popular regions of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where the land was barren and the climate hostile. Settlements were isolated and nothing in the way of training was provided for the settlers. Settlers who had experienced only slavery and soldiering were required to take on new identities as independent smallholders in an unfamiliar agrarian environment. Unsurprisingly, the majority of agricultural settlements occupied by the freed slaves failed to prosper. The Sierra Leone Company, in which the Abolitionist William Wilberforce had a key role, was anxious to establish agricultural settlements in West Africa. Following negotiations, approximately one thousand freed slaves left Canada for Sierra Leone. The Imperial government also attempted to settle Maroons in Nova Scotia. Maroons were the descendants of slaves who had escaped bondage when Britain captured Jamaica from Spain. The settlement of Maroons in Canada was a failure from the start. In Nova Scotia where they had been settled, they repeatedly demanded to leave. Eventually, they were shipped to Sierra Leone, again following negotiations with the Sierra Leone Company. Freed slaves who declined to go to Sierra Leone and remained in Canada did not flourish. Many became destitute and dependent on annual grants for relief. A small number migrated to Trinidad, others eventually drifted to the towns where some did well but most did not. From the 1790s onwards further black migration into Canada came about through the black fugitive slaves who made their way north from

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America’s slave-holding states. Over the border in Canada, fugitive slaves were protected by law. A slave crossing the border into Canada was immediately free, and could not be returned to a slave owner. The Underground Railroad provided slaves with an organised system of escape to Canada. Helpful supporters were located at “stations” along the route and would hide the slaves during daylight hours. The most popular route went through Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, crossing the Detroit River to freedom in Canada. The defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War in 1865, brought an end to slavery in the Southern States, and reduced the flow of black refugees into Canada. Some migrants took the decision to return to the United States but many did not. The strength of Ida Greaves’ thesis, remarkable in that it dates from the early 1930s, is in her brave approach to racial discrimination in the context of those black citizens who took the decision to remain in Canada. … after the War many refugees returned to the United States. Lincoln’s Proclamation had filled them with a new confidence in their old home, and some of them still had relatives and friends in the South. For the large numbers who remained in Canada, however, conditions were different. Their welcome vanished with the cause that had originated it; the people who had regarded the abolition of slavery as an urgent moral task had no interest in the future of the Negro as such, and his race found in Canada as elsewhere that there are more subtle and pernicious forces of hostility than legal slavery. (Greaves, op. cit., p. 57) The remaining chapters of Ida Greaves’ thesis paint a disturbing picture of the extensive “prejudices and conventions” in Canadian society towards its black citizens, in the decades following the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. She notes the steady decrease in the total number of blacks in Canada between 1871 and 1921. The overall decline came about in spite of the rise in black immigration from the United States to work on the railways, plus the increase in the numbers of black Caribbean migrants seeking employment in Canadian towns and cities when the market for sugar declined. From close study of the relevant statistics, Ida Greaves concluded that black emigration from Canada, as migrants re-crossed the border into the United States, more than compensated for the numbers newly arrived. Her thesis is that public prejudice lay behind the steady decrease in Canada’s black population. In employment, blacks were not allowed to compete seriously with white workers. Trade unions would not admit them to membership. Black girls and women were mostly employed as domestic servants; they could not obtain work in offices or shops.

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 21 The thesis describes the status of blacks in Canada in 1930 in the bleakest terms … the public attitude to Negroes has been such as to make the name not merely a description [of colour] but an invidious distinction. For example, she quotes extensively (Greaves, op. cit., p. 63) from a letter sent to her from the Deputy Minister of Immigration and Colonization, setting out official policy towards Negroes in Canada. So far as the Negro is concerned we have never encouraged his settlement in Canada regardless of his occupation … His quoted letter goes on The Negro is never racially assimilated, and one cannot but hope that the day will never come in this country when we shall have large minority unassimilable groups such as the negro, who regardless of the possession of excellent qualities can never be assimilated racially … The thesis takes pains to demonstrate that discrimination could not be addressed solely by changes in the legal status of blacks. Significantly it was Stephen Leacock, in his role of supervisor, who took on the responsibility of writing to the Ontario Attorney General on Ida Greaves’ behalf to clarify certain judgements which had been arrived at in the higher courts. An example quoted in the thesis referred to four friends, two black and two white, who had booked tickets for orchestra seats at the theatre in Montreal. On arrival, the management insisted that the whole party instead should sit in inferior seats in the balcony. One of the parties took action against the theatre “for being prevented from sitting in the orchestra chairs on account of his colour”. First, the Superior Court found in his favour and granted him damages of $10. Then the theatre appealed and the Court of Appeal reversed the decision. The ruling was as follows: The management of a theatre may impose restrictions and make rules as to the place which each person should occupy … Therefore, when a coloured man wants to take a seat in a part of the House which he knows is by a rule of the manager prohibited to a coloured person, he cannot complain if he is refused admission. Ida Greaves concluded that “equality before the law” for blacks in Canada did not in itself remedy the injustices of discrimination. Only by close

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examination of the economic and social structures underpinning relationships between black and white, could explanations be sought and remedies found. The masters thesis did not in itself provide the explanations and remedies she had called for. Seeking answers to serious questions of race, and finding remedies for discrimination, would occupy others in their research well into the twenty-first century. But her work was path-breaking in the sense that it identified and addressed a “hidden” problem in Canada. This was a country which had been celebrated as a haven for blacks, a promised land where freed slaves and fugitive slaves could lose their shackles. The reality, as she demonstrated, was very different. The men and women in black communities in Canada did not flourish. This was irrespective of their status, whether they had been born in Canada or whether they had come to Canada as former slaves or free migrants. It was irrespective of their origins, in colonial Africa or the West Indies or the United States. Why should this be so? The thesis draws attention to the fact that language did not separate black communities from their neighbours. In a country where many new immigrants did not speak any English or French at all, the black population appeared to have the advantage that it was universally Englishspeaking. Nor did religion divide white from black. Almost every church and faith was represented in the black communities. Quite simply it was the low economic status of the black communities which came to distinguish them from their neighbours. Addressing the question of the relative poverty of blacks in Canada, the thesis cites their very limited career opportunities, … no matter how good their education, [there is] no stimulus to a sacrifice of time and money for the sake of increased attainment. (Greaves, op. cit., p 94) As evidence of this, Ida Greaves refers to the small numbers of black pupils in the higher grades of the public high Schools, leading on to the fact that, at the time she was writing, there was not a single black student of Canadian birth studying in the Canadian national and provincial universities, with the exception of universities located in Nova Scotia. Equally disturbing were frequent complaints of racial discrimination made by black students from the West Indies and the US, who had come to Canada specifically to study in the universities. Although university administrations invariably denied any academic discrimination against black students, the belief that there was widespread racial discrimination in Canadian universities was common, certainly among the West Indians. The issue had been raised with particular reference to the experience of

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 23 black students at McGill. The Bahamas Legislature had even proposed removing McGill from its approved list for government scholarships. Nor was the neighbouring University of Montreal immune from complaints about discrimination. Ida Greaves reported that she had written to the Registrar of the University of Montreal with a question about the number of enrolments of black students. The reply was brief and to the point “Some years ago one [student] came from Trinidad” (Greaves, op. cit., p. 95) And it was certainly the case that throughout Canada black students studying medicine could be banned from clinical practice in hospitals and referred instead to black hospitals in the US. Although there were a few blacks in Canadian cities in the 1920s who had succeeded in professional or business careers, mostly as doctors or lawyers, these were very much the exceptions. For the rest, what the thesis termed “the prejudices and conventions of society” limited economic opportunities in black communities to the point where “their economic role is of necessity humble … Both men and women find employment within their own communities as barbers, tailors, seamstresses and saloon and shopkeepers, and outside as bootblacks, café attendants and in other similar capacities” (Greaves, op. cit., p. 72). She noted that the railways employed blacks as porters, and here as elsewhere there was a general reluctance to give workers more than lowgrade jobs. Where skilled workers were concerned “they have not been allowed to compete seriously with white workers” (Greaves, op. cit., p. 74). But the thesis goes on to argue that black migrants, and in particular those arriving from the West Indies after 1918, did not accept discrimination without demur. They were outspoken, even confrontational, “quick to feel and resent an insult, and unwilling to acknowledge a racial segregation that implies his inferiority” (Greaves, op.cit., p. 100). Discriminated against, marginalised perhaps, but certainly not passive; we learn that West Indians in Montreal were keen to introduce Free Masonry rather than join exclusively black organisations. They formed conspicuously successful and well-financed cricket clubs. And their highly talented cricket teams, which tended to finish top of the league, understandably faced little in the way of open discrimination. To the modern reader, The Negro in Canada is a remarkably confident and prescient piece of research. So it raises the question as to why it was passed over without comment or acknowledgement in later studies. For example, there is the much-praised book by Robin W Winks The Blacks in Canada: A History. First published in 1971, and going into later editions, it was described by its reviewer Allen P.Stouffer as “an event of unequalled importance in African Canadian historiography”.14 Sadly it makes no reference to Ida Greaves’ pioneering work. Stouffer in his comprehensive

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review of Winks in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, alludes briefly to Fred Landon and Ida Greaves, but only in the context of their contribution to “broader aspects of African Canadian history”. His review credits Robin Winks with “showing that African Canadians were historically the object of their white Canadian neighbours’ prejudiced opinions and discriminatory actions … [forcing] Canadians to undergo a sobering self-examination in light of the unflattering reflections they saw in his scholarly mirror” (Shouffer, op. cit., p. 373). There is no acknowledgement either by Winks, or his sympathetic reviewer, of the path trodden 40 years earlier by Ida Greaves. Times are changing, and it is refreshing to see that Ida Greaves was included in Anne Innis Dagg’s “The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors” (2001) which cites Greaves’ work in the 1920s researching the status of blacks in Canada. It is also the case that her thesis features, in the present day in the black history programme at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Ida Greaves had made many reference in her thesis to Nova Scotia which had a longsettled black community, but even here she reported that two Canadianborn graduates, “persons of special ability and ambition … had found no scope for progress in Canada” (Greaves, op. cit., p. 70). Instead they chose to move to the United States, both of them taking up appointments as Presidents of black colleges. Literature from today’s black history programme at Dalhousie University draws attention to the fact that in contrast to the situation in Ida Greaves’ time, many black graduates today fulfil senior roles as professors, judges, lawyers and doctors in Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, just as in Ida Greaves’ day, the middle-class lifestyle still eludes a disproportionate number of African Nova Scotians. One reason why Ida Greaves’ Canadian work may have been neglected by later writers is that she did not follow up her masters studies on racial discrimination in any of her later research. We can only surmise that when she applied for research fellowships in economics in the United States, as she did following her McGill years, “racial discrimination” as her proposed topic would not have been a recipe for success. However, on a personal level, she remained very committed to the study of racial discrimination. Evidence for this is in an article which she submitted to the McGill News in 1933 to mark the centenary of the Act of Parliament in Britain in 1833, which provided for the abolition of slavery in 1834.15 This article in a McGill alumnus newspaper, Ida Greaves drew attention to the fact that 1834 was only the beginning of the liberation of slaves. French colonies did not participate until 1848; the United States did not abolish slavery until 1863; and in Spain and Brazil liberation took a further 25 years. Furthermore, she argues that it was the

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 25 abolition of slavery itself which was a significant driving force for a “new phase of racial history” in Africa, namely the establishment of the European colonial empires. To humanitarians, the abolition of slavery was a triumph for the higher feelings of mankind, but it did not put an end to a relationship that was in the nature of things, dominating and exacting on the one side, and productive of ineffective, though resentful, resistance on the other. (Greaves, 1933, op. cit., p. 37) Abolition gave rise to two problems. What would the freed slaves do with their time? And how would the plantation owners get labour? She argues that the mistake by those who followed deductive [i.e. competitive] theory, was to expect that the freed slaves would happily settle down to industrious labour. But this failed to take into account the fact that the slave had still to work in the harsh old ways, and in many instances for even less reward. Nor was there any reason to believe that plantation owners themselves had changed their coercive attitudes towards their black workers when dealing with free labour. Sugar declined in importance in international trade during the nineteenth century. European interests came to focus on African products such as palm oil, rather than sugar from the West Indies. Even so, a supply of cheap labour was necessary, but here the planters had to contend with an African population which had a customary lifestyle of subsistence agriculture. Supported by their own land and crops there was an alternative to wage labour. Colonial governments chimed in to encourage the “civilising” influence of wage labour by imposing taxes for which the population had to earn cash. Violence and fear of violence frequently reinforced the compulsion to engage in wage labour. Not long after ceasing to take Africans from Africa, the civilised powers took Africa from the Africans. (Greaves 1933, op. cit., p. 38) The article, directed at an audience of alumni of McGill University, is written deliberately in a conversational style. But its anti-colonial sentiments are unmistakable. And it has significance from another perspective. Early development economics was very much concerned with the impact of different institutional arrangements on human behaviour. This short piece aimed at the general reader is an indictment of the institutional arrangements underpinning the post-slavery economies and it merits closer consideration.

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A useful starting point from which to explore the significance of this short article by Ida Greaves is Nathan Rosenberg’s classic paper in the 1960s, in which he drew attention to human behaviour as a muchneglected institutional aspect of the Wealth of Nations.16 Rosenberg argued that modern interpretations of Smith’s views have tended to concentrate on the human agent as having a single aim, that is, to maximise wealth. But Smith had a much more elaborate view of human behaviour, one in which the individuals are subject to conflicting forces, including for example a desire for “ease”, or for “security”. The ideal institutional structure would encourage the individual to strike a balance between such forces. This would support the broader interests of society because the sum of individual efforts (and their efficiency), secures the greatest wealth for the nation as a whole. According to Smith, the individual will work hardest, and most efficiently, when the rewards for effort are neither too great nor too small. Too great, as for the large landowner or the monopolist, the tendency will be to live like all who have “large revenue” and spend the greater part of time “in festivity, vanity, and in dissipation”. Where the reward for effort is too low, where there is no connection between effort and reward, there will be an aversion to labour because the individual receives no benefit from it. Smith himself cited slaves, as an example of those for whom there is no incentive to effort. Ida Greaves argued in this vein that it is the institutional arrangements which persist post-slavery, which discourage wage labour in colonies, which was often condemned as native indolence “No difficulty would have arisen [post-Abolition] if the natives had been willing to work as cheap labour at the appointed tasks of developing their country, but they were not. For one thing, the whole structure of a wage-paying capitalist economy was alien to them and not easily harmonised with their tribal organisation of customary subsistence. Secondly, in their own land and crops, they had an alternative to wage-earning which is rare in a civilised country. This made their ‘character’ distinctly irritating to employers … ” Likewise, the landowner, in this case the settler in the plantation economy, was disqualified both by his relative wealth, and by his discriminatory attitudes, from overseeing the efficient operation of the plantation. It was left to the government to come to the employers’ assistance, either by imposing a tax, for which the natives had to earn cash, or directly compelling them to work, when they might or might not be paid”. (Greaves, 1933, op. cit., p. 38)

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 27 It is reasonable to conclude from her masters thesis, and from the short paper submitted to McGill in 1933, that Ida Greaves was very comfortable with the political economy she studied at McGill University, and drew inspiration from it both for her research into the status of black communities in Canada, and for her later research into the newly emerging issues of decolonisation and development. Her attachment to political economy, especially from the 1940s onwards when institutional economics was in rapid retreat, may be a factor which needs to be taken into account in assessing the lack of progress in her career in later years. For the McGill period, however, what evidence there is indicates that she was inspired by the economics which she had studied there. She would have been happy to stay on in Canada for doctoral research had the opportunity presented itself. In January 1930, as her masters studies were drawing to a close (the thesis was submitted in April 1930) she applied for a scholarship offered by the Canadian Federation of University Women. The scholarship would have funded research for a PhD tenable at a Canadian university. It seems that she was unsuccessful in this application but her references for the scholarship have survived, and they are outstanding. One from the Vice-Chancellor of McGill, Arthur W. Currie, describes her as a “brilliant student”. The Dean of the Arts Faculty, Ira MacKay, describes her as “clearly one of the best, if not the very best, of the women students in the Department of Economics and Political at McGill for the last few years … her personal qualities are as highly creditable as her scholarship”.17 Ida Greaves must have had good memories of McGill. She recognised her debt to the University in the Bursary which she bequeathed in 1992. As a female student she would have been subject to all the petty restrictions common at the time, but like many of her fellow residents, she seems to have recalled her years at the Royal Victoria College with great affection. One of her near-contemporaries, who graduated in the early thirties, spoke of the camaraderie that thrived among the women at Royal Victoria College. Though there was inequality of treatment, a sense of community made campus life in Canada in the thirties very rewarding for the small minority of women fortunate enough to have the opportunity of a university education. Notes 1 Paul Axelrod, “McGill University” on the Landscape of Canadian Higher Education, in Higher Education Perspectives, Vol 1, 1998. The article discusses the unique characteristics of McGill University in the early twentieth century, setting its story within the wider cultural and political landscape of English-speaking Canada. 2 Myron J Frankman, “Stephen Leacock, Economist: An Owl Among Parrots”, in David Staines, ed. (1986) Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, pp. 51–58.

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8 9 10

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12 13 14

The Lasting Legacy of McGill Frankman a modern supporter of Leacock, argues that he merits much greater recognition for his contribution to economics. Leacock wrote to influence public opinion on major economic issues. His problem was that his chosen audience was the general public, not academics with their unrealistic formal models, for whom he had little respect. In consequence, he was criticised by academics for what was regarded as his lightweight and superficial treatment of questions of national policy. Was Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s influenced by Keynesian or institutional economics? It has been convincingly argued that many New Deal measures adopted in the US came from institutional economics: for example Wesley Mitchell on the business cycle, Simon Kuznets’ statistical national income work, and J.M. Clark and Rexford Tugwell on economic planning. See Tilman, Rick “John R. Commons, the New Deal and the American Tradition of Empirical Collectivism”, Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor and Francis Ltd Vol. 42, No. 3, Sept 2008, pp. 823–851. Frankman (1986) “Leacock was emphatic that no child’s opportunity in life should be ‘obliterated by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth’. Those familiar with the enormous socio-economic problems of the less-developed countries since World War II will recognize that Leacock’s prescription for social justice overlaps considerably with the Basic Needs approach belatedly advocated by the World Bank in the late 1970s. For two decades development economists had focused their attention on the production side, leaving children to share their parents’ lot. To Leacock it was self-evident that a child’s brain and body are stunted by lack of food and air, today’s development economists required scholarly confirmation of this before reconsidering their policy approaches” (op. cit.), p. 54. Undergraduate Scholarships and Awards, https://www.mcgill.ca/studentawards Macpherson, Deirdre The Suffragettes Daughter, Betty Archdale: Her Life of Feminism, Cricket, War and Education (2002) Rosenberg Publishing. https://yearbooks.mcgill.ca. This is the digitized collection of Old McGill yearbooks dating from 1898, in the McGill University Archives. I am grateful to Emeritus Professor Mark Figueroa of the University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica for drawing my attention to this resource. “Jewish Students Gain Honors at McGill”, Bulletin of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 29, 1929. “McGill’s 1926 Jewish Ban”, The McGill Daily, September 2, 2018. Macmillan, Margaret Stephen Leacock (2010) Penguin Canada. Reviewers found this a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of Leacock. He was an excellent speaker, much admired by his students. But he was very much a public figure, a popular intellectual, not rated highly in academic circles. Landon, Fred “The Negro Migration to Canada after the Passing of the Fugitive Slave Act”, Journal of Negro History, Jan 1920, Vol. 5 No. 1 Karolyn Smardz Frost ed. Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918-1967, (2009), Toronto, Dundurn Press. Walker, Barrington Review of Collected writings of Fred Landon, The Canadian Historical Review, March 2010, Vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 155–157. Landon, Fred “Review of the Negro in Canada by Ida Greaves”, The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 1932, pp. 217–218. Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, (1971), 2nd edn (1997) Montreal & Kingston; McGill-Queens University Press

The Lasting Legacy of McGill 29 Reviewed by Allen P. Stouffer, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2001), Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 372–373. 15 Ida Greaves “Slavery and its Supersession”, McGill News, Montreal, 1933. 16 “Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations”, Journal of Political Economy (Dec1960), Vol. 68, No. 6, pp. 557–570. 17 Letters to The Chairman of the Committee of Selection for the Canadian Federation of University Women, January 1930, held in the student files of Ida Greaves.

References Axelrod, Paul (1998) “McGill University on the Landscape of Canadian Higher Education: Historical Reflections”, Higher Education Perspectives, Vol. 1 Elgersman Lee, Maureen (1999) Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica, Taylor & Francis Frankman, Myron J. (1986) “Stephen Leacock, Economist: An Owl Among the Parrots”, in David Staines ed., Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, pp. 51–58 Greaves, Ida (April 1930) “The Negro in Canada”, Thesis submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Economics and Political Science, McGill University, Greaves, Ida (1931) The Negro in Canada, McGill University Economic Studies, No. 16, Orillia, Ontario, Packet-Times Press Greaves, Ida (1933) “Slavery and Its Supersession”, McGill News, Montreal Jewish Telegraph Agency (1929) “Jewish Students Gain Honours at McGill”, JTA, May Landon, Fred (1920) “The Negro Migration to Canada after the Passing of the Fugitive Slave Act”, Journal of Negro History, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan Landon, Fred (1932) “Review of Ida Greaves, ‘The Negro in Canada’”, The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, June, pp. 217–218 Macpherson, Deirdre (2002) The Suffragette’s Daughter: Betty Archdale: Her Life of Feminism, Cricket, War & Education, Rosenberg Publishing MacMillan, Margaret (2010) Stephen Leacock Penguin Canada NDP McGill, (2018) “McGill’s 1926 Jewish Ban”, The McGill Daily, September Rosenberg, Nathan (1960) “Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations”, Journal of Political Economy, December, Vol. 68, No. 6, pp. 557–570 Smardz Frost, Karolyn ed. (2009) Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918–1967, Toronto, Dundurn Press Stouffer, Allen P. (2001) “The Blacks in Canada: A History, a Review”, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 372–373 Walker, Barrington (2010) “Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918–1967 (review)”, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, pp. 155–157, March Winks, Robin W. (1997) The Blacks in Canada: A History (2nd edition), Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queens University Press

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Ida Greaves completed her masters studies at McGill in April 1930 and in October 1930 took up a Whitney Fellowship in Economics at Radcliffe College. This was the women’s liberal arts college in Cambridge Massachusetts which was the counterpart to the all-male Harvard College. In 1931 she moved on to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, another high-status women’s liberal arts college, where she held a Resident Fellowship in Economics and Politics. She applied from Bryn Mawr to the London School of Economics in April 1932 for registration as a PhD student, and arrived in London in October 1932 to begin her studies. The thesis she completed at LSE in 1934 forms the subject-matter of the next chapter, Chapter 4. It gave rise to the book, Modern Production Among Backward People, published by Allen & Unwin in 1935, recognised as a classic account of the organisation of tropical agriculture, and a pioneering study in the emerging discipline of development economics. Though the two years which Ida Greaves spent at LSE in the early 1930s have some documentation, comparatively little information is available on the brief periods she spent in the United States after McGill, at Radcliffe College and Bryn Mawr. There are no publications which can reasonably be attributed to research at either of these institutions, no letters have come to light, and only the slimmest information is available on the courses she followed and the research undertaken. It invites speculation that for her the two years spent at Radcliffe College and Bryn Mawr did not live up to expectations, possibly that they were not the happiest and most productive years. But this remains conjecture. Radcliffe College was founded in the 1870s and from the beginning it had the unusual feature in that the academic faculty was based at another institution, namely Harvard College. Harvard professors first delivered a lecture for their male students. Then they crossed the campus and provided the same lecture to the female students at Radcliffe College. It was claimed with some justification that not all of the Harvard professors took their Radcliffe College contracts seriously. In spite of these drawbacks by DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-3

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the time that Ida Greaves joined Radcliffe College as a Whitney Fellow in 1930, it had developed into the leading women’s college in the United States for graduate work, notably in science, medicine, economics and international relations. Like her, the women graduates were high achievers. They left their mark on their respective professions, in spite of studying in a hostile and discriminatory environment generated by the Harvard faculty. In Harvard’s economics department as late as 1926, women were excluded from the weekly graduate economics seminar. Irwin Collier’s study of the Harvard archives revealed that nine Radcliffe female graduate students petitioned the Chairman of the Economics Department before the beginning of the 1925–1926 academic year, to allow them “the privilege of regular attendance at the seminary”. They were arguing against the customary exclusion of women from the economics seminar, which they believed was placing them at a serious disadvantage. Not only were they prevented from attending papers presented by distinguished visitors, they were unable to discuss research issues with Harvard’s male postgraduate economics students.1 In Ida Greaves’ time at Radcliffe College in 1930 this particular situation had been rectified to some extent but other problems relating to discrimination and exclusion remained for women students. The Whitney Fellowship which Ida Greaves was awarded enabled a graduate student to undertake research leading to a PhD degree. Graduate students were also expected to pass examinations in preparatory courses for which they were given a grade. Ida Greaves’ Radcliffe College transcript reveals that she took three of the preparatory Harvard economics courses: Economic Theory, Labor Problems, and Money and Banking. The Economic Theory lectures were provided by the distinguished academic F.W. (Frank William) Taussig, who had been appointed Professor of Economics at Harvard in 1892. He stayed at Harvard for the remainder of his academic career, and was widely regarded as the economic voice of Harvard. As such he came to be a powerful influence on US governments, acting as a policy adviser between the wars. In the history of economic thought, Taussig is noted for his contribution to the study of international economics. It is highly probable that it was his lectures on classical trade theory that exerted such a strong influence on Ida Greaves’ interest in the subject. Taussig was a noted follower of Smith, Ricardo and Mill and is credited with promoting classical trade theory in the United States. The aspect of classical trade theory to which Ida Greaves drew attention in her later papers in the 1950s was JS Mill’s view that colonial trade was “hardly to be considered external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country, and is amenable to the principles of home trade” (Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book 3, Chap 25). This was not an interpretation of

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colonial trade patterns which would find much favour among radical theorists in the 1950s. Mill had argued that the West Indies was simply a place where England found it convenient to produce sugar and coffee. The capital came from England and the “staples”, sugar and coffee, were sold in England by English merchants. In her later papers on Colonial Trade, Ida Greaves followed Mill arguing that the West Indies was simply the location where English merchants found it profitable to acquire staples for sale in England. Significantly local labour under colonialism, irrespective of whether it was slave or free, was under the control of England and its merchants just as much as the capital involved. Not all of Taussig’s Economic Theory lectures would have been so inspirational or even acceptable to Ida Greaves because he was also a noted critic of the American Institutionalist School which had featured so strongly in her studies at McGill. The role of institutions, and their influences on personal motivations and responses, which were so important in her thesis The Negro in Canada were of little account in a Harvard world, where the market ruled. In his writings, Taussig described as “parasites” of the market economy persons suffering all manner of disadvantage: race, class, gender, even physical and mental impairment. He had no understanding or sympathy with those who failed to prosper under the market system. How Ida Greaves responded to Taussig’s attacks on institutionalism must be a matter for conjecture. For what it is worth her College transcript shows that she scored a B on Taussig’s Economic Theory course, an A on Labour Problems, and an A on Money and Banking.2 However, these courses were only preparatory for the PhD. The Whitney Fellowship had been awarded principally for research leading to a PhD degree. But there is much uncertainty about the outcome of her research activities at Radcliffe College. In her later application for funding at LSE Ida Greaves recorded her research topic at Radcliffe College as “British-American Shipping” but there is no further reference to this area of research, and nothing related to it in her later publications. Possibly the opportunities for research at Radcliffe College did not live up to expectations. It is possible too that finance was a problem. Massachusettes was particularly badly affected by the Depression. There were major repercussions on the Colleges with many students at Radcliffe and Harvard unable to pay fees. If Radcliffe College had financial difficulties, it is possible that the Fellowship could not be carried forward to a second year. Whatever the reason, academic or financial, Ida Greaves went home to Barbados at the end of her first year at Radcliffe College. She returned to the United States after the summer vacation this time to take up a Residential Fellowship at Bryn Mawr. She arrived in Boston in October 1931 in time for the start of the new academic year. Bryn Mawr had been founded as a women’s liberal arts

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college. By the 1930s it had developed a strong academic reputation, and was noted for its graduate programmes. Unusually for a women’s college its postgraduate students were strongly encouraged to register for a PhD. It is likely that Ida Greaves as holder of a Residential Fellowship would have been expected to undertake doctoral-level research. As a postgraduate, she was located in Radnor Hall. Her later application to the London School of Economics listed her research area at Bryn Mawr as “Foreign Investment and International Law” carried out under the supervision of Professor Charles Fenwick. Charles Fenwick was a distinguished scholar and international lawyer, professor of political science at Bryn Mawr from 1918 to 1947. He was legal adviser during the Roosevelt administration, and among many other key international offices was Director of International Law for the PanAmerican Union until 1962. In many respects, he was an ideal supervisor for Ida Greaves. Her research topic at Bryn Mawr bridged economics and law and both subjects were clearly of interest to her. The limitations of legal institutions in addressing open discrimination in black labour markets had been explored very successfully in her McGill masters thesis. The Residential Fellowship would seem to offer an ideal opportunity for further development of her ideas and given the academic standing of her supervisor it was undoubtedly a valuable step forward. This begs the question as to why she left Bryn Mawr so quickly. Within a matter of months, in Spring 1932, she had applied to register for a PhD at the London School of Economics. At that point, she was little more than six months into the Bryn Mawr Fellowship. Personal reasons probably played a part. Her friend from undergraduate days, Betty Archdale, was already studying international law at the University of London where Betty Archdale’s biographer tells us she was enjoying an enviable social life mixing her legal studies with feminist agitation and cricket. The attractions of student life in London may well have been communicated to Ida Greaves by Betty Archdale. And finance, or rather the lack of it, may have played a part once more. There is a letter on Ida Greaves’ student file at LSE in which she asks whether she would be eligible for one of the research studentships tenable at the School.3 In fact she was successful in her application to LSE and was awarded the School’s Studentship for Women on registration for the PhD. This covered all fees for two years. Additionally, there was a stipend of £150 per year. The Studentship was generous in its provisions, and very probably exceeded anything available to her at Bryn Mawr or Radcliffe College. It is also possible, though speculative, that there were some aspects of Bryn Mawr culture that Ida Greaves would have found unsettling and which encouraged her to look elsewhere for doctoral studies. The early history of Bryn Mawr was marked by racism. It was also noted for its anti-

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Catholic and anti-Semitic admissions and hiring policies.4 Although the worst was over by the early 1930s, Bryn Mawr had still to get to grips with this legacy. As late as 1921 a Catholic economics lecturer had been threatened with the termination of her contract solely on the grounds of her religion.5 Ida Greaves’ own supervisor, Charles Fenwick, himself a Catholic had also been the subject of discriminatory attitudes and policies on the part of the College administration. The extent to which these attitudes persisted, and may even have had some influence on Ida Greaves’ move to London, cannot be ruled out. Charles Fenwick was a referee for Ida Greaves in her application to the London School of Economics, though the reference itself has not survived.6 When she left Bryn Mawr in the late Spring of 1932, Ida Greaves did not return to Barbados immediately. It would appear from her correspondence with LSE that she spent the summer in Toronto possibly staying with friends or relatives. She was back in Barbados in early September, from where she submitted a formal application to the University of London for funding for a PhD, accompanied by a copy of her MA thesis. She sailed for England in September, departing from Montego Bay, Jamaica, and arriving in Bristol on October 2, 1932. Her London address was to be Crosby Hall, in Chelsea, which was the London headquarters of the British Federation of University Women. The Federation of University Women had leased the building in 1925 to provide a hall of residence for visiting female academics. Like Ida Greaves, many of its residents came from overseas, and it also provided support for a significant number of women refugees from German universities in the 1930s. Crosby Hall was also where Betty Archdale was living in 1931, and it is fair to assume that she was the initial point of contact for Ida Greaves when she decided where to live in London. However, by 1932 Betty Archdale and two of her colleagues had moved out of Crosby Hall, going into lodgings at Swan House, Black Raven Alley, just above the Old Swan Stairs on the Thames. Ida Greaves herself only stayed a month at Crosby Hall during her first year at LSE, though she later moved back there. In November 1932, one month after her arrival in London, she joined the three women at Swan House. The lodgings were convenient for University College where Betty Archdale was studying law and for the London School of Economics where Ida Greaves was registered for a PhD. Living at Swan House with Betty Archdale and her colleagues in the early 1930s placed Ida Greaves in contact with a highly influential and hard-working feminist network in London. Betty Archdale was the honorary political secretary of the Six Point Group founded in 1921 by Lady Rhondda (Margaret Haig Thomas, Second Viscountess Rhondda). The name of the Group referred to the six key aims of its founder: the first four covered the rights of children, rights of widows, rights of unmarried

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mothers, and mothers’ rights as their children’s guardians. Points five and six of the campaign called for equal pay for female teachers, and for equal employment opportunities for women in the civil service. The voice of the Six Point Group was the magazine Time and Tide supported and financed by Lady Rhondda. It had a highly influential group of sympathisers among middle-class and left-leaning writers and politicians. It included popular writers such as Rebecca West, EM Delafield, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain. There were prominent journalists such as HN Brailsford, and his partner the artist Clare Leighton. Harold Macmillan was numbered among the politicians who supported the Six Point Group. By the 1930s the Group had expanded its focus internationally, and was lobbying the League of Nations in Geneva to implement an Equal Rights Treaty. Betty Archdale’s mother, the suffragette Helen Archdale, took a key role in the international agenda of the movement, spending time in Geneva and the United States. Betty Archdale also appeared in Geneva addressing the League of Nations. She championed the rights of married women to work, and also had an international focus in the Bill she supported in the Indian legislative assembly granting equal rights in property for Hindu women. By 1932, when Ida Greaves arrived in London, Betty Archdale had already added to her extensive political and international activities by joining the Labour party and acting as private secretary to the prominent Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson7. In 1928 the Equal Franchise Act granted women in Britain equal voting rights with men at the age of 21. The equalisation of voting age between men and women at age 21 followed decades of pressure by prominent feminists, (Fig 3.1). Betty Archdale and her mother Helen were key figures in the movement for womens’ rights in the inter
war period. Ida Greaves only stayed in Swan House for her first year at LSE. For her second year, beginning in October 1933, she moved back to Crosby Hall. The intervening summer vacation she had spent back home in Barbados. Lacking any firm evidence one way or another, it must be a matter of conjecture as to how well Ida Greaves had fitted into Betty Archdale’s circle in London during that year, and specifically into life at Swan House. From what we know of her early career up to this point, it is likely that she had sympathy with the aims of the Six Point Group. But it is doubtful whether she could have spared many hours away from her academic research to become actively involved in the Group. She was wholly committed to her studies at LSE, and completed her PhD from submission through to examination in less than two years, a remarkable achievement which would have precluded participation in many social and political activities. Ida Greaves recognised the likely demands on her time. In a letter she wrote to Miss Mair, School Secretary, on learning that she had been awarded the Studentship for Women she said that she was

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Figure 3.1 Suffragettes Near the London School of Economics in the 1920s. Courtesy of the LSE Library.

“exceedingly glad of this opportunity and will give all my time to study and research … ”8 Financial support may once again have been an important further consideration. It appears that she depended very much on her Studentship to fund her stay in London. As the Studentship was limited to two years it gave urgency to the need to successfully complete the PhD on time. Betty Archdale’s personal circumstances were very different. The demands of the LLB and LLM were modest and left time for other pursuits. Famously this included sport. She was the captain of the English women’s cricket team in 1934, and led the first English cricket team to tour Australia and New Zealand in 1934/35 securing an English victory over Australia. She was one of the first women to be elected an honorary life member of the hitherto exclusively male members of the famous Lords cricket club in London. She and her mother moved in upper middle-class circles and as committed feminists both enjoyed the support of Lady Rhondda, having lived with her for extended periods in London and

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Wales. Likewise, the two other residents in Swan House, friends of Betty Archdale and supporters of the Six Point Group, were both financially independent women. One worked in advertising and the other in accountancy. They were mature working professionals who had both the time and the resources to devote to feminist causes. For Ida Greaves, it was clear from the outset that the demands of the LSE doctorate were by no means light and would have ruled out extensive outside commitments. In addition to her research, she was required to take a number of courses and attend seminars as recommended by her supervisor. Courses were intended to bridge the disciplines appropriate to her thesis. In Year 1 she was required to attend the Economic Theory seminar, and to take three courses: Economic Analysis, Applied Economics and Economics Methodology. In Year 2 she attended the Modern Anthropology seminar, and took two courses: Theory and Practice of the Labour Market, and Industrial Labour in India and the Far East.9 The title of the thesis as approved in the official documentation was The Organisation of Labour in Tropical Agriculture. It was carried out under the supervision of Arnold Plant. She was very fortunate in having Arnold Plant as her supervisor because he had a particular interest in her research topic, stemming from the time he had spent in South Africa. After graduating from LSE with first-class honours he had been appointed to a Chair of Commerce at the University of Cape Town in 1924. This provided him with first-hand knowledge of the impact of racial laws on labour markets. In his early papers written in South Africa, he compared the restrictions placed on black South Africans in labour markets to “those commonly employed to impede competition”. Although Arnold Plant did not publish prolifically, and had industrial organisation rather than race relations as his recognised area of expertise, nevertheless he maintained his interest in the economics of race and race relations well into the 1960s.10 Ida Greaves was just one of a number of talented students who owed much to the dedication of Arnold Plant. In his autobiographical account for the Nobel Laureate Arthur Lewis had been keen to acknowledge his debt to his distinguished teachers, naming John Hicks, Roy Allen, Nicholas Kaldor, Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins. But he said that his greatest personal debt was to the lesser-known Arnold Plant. He was my mentor, and without his word at crucial points I would have received neither the scholarship nor the assistant lectureship. (This was the school’s first black appointment and there was a little resistance.) He and I had intellectual difficulties since he was a laissez-faire economist and I was not; but this did not stand in the way of our relationship. (W.A. Lewis, 1979)11

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Ronald Coase was another outstanding economist and Nobel prize winner who came to remember Arnold Plant as an inspiring and generous teacher, so also was Arthur Seldon, the joint founder of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs.12 It is clear that Arnold Plant had a great respect for the particular talents of Ida Greaves. The University Registrar reported that “Her supervising teacher, Professor Plant, considered her a brilliant student and her thesis an admirable piece of work”.13 On the basis of his high opinion of her thesis, Arnold Plant also nominated Ida Greaves for the award of the School’s Hutchinson Medal: As a researcher [Miss Greaves] displayed exceptional initiative and resource in amassing material and composing drafts … She aimed at using the techniques of an economist to explain the labour situation in tropical countries …but set herself to understand the special contribution which the anthropologists and others are making … In a most skilful way she has mastered and digested the detail, fitting it into a logical plan which for the first time gives a satisfying economic analysis of this important field14 In later years Arnold Plant also supported Ida Greaves in a number of her applications for employment, and as we will see in Chapter 5 corresponded regularly with her when she returned to her family home in Barbados during World War II. He was also instrumental in getting her thesis accepted for publication by George Allen & Unwin Ltd., No. 5 in the LSE Series, Studies in Economics and Commerce. The Series had three referees, all of them distinguished LSE Professors: Arnold Plant; Lionel Robbins (Figure 3.2). Ida Greaves’ student file at LSE also reveals a rather touching correspondence concerning the Women’s Studentship which she had held for the two years of the doctoral programme. In August 1934 the Registrar wrote to Miss Hutchins, of Holland Park, London, who was the donor of the Studentship, to inform her of Ida Greaves success in the award of the PhD: Miss Hutchins responded: It is a great pleasure to me. I may venture to say I was very favourably impressed when I had the pleasure of meeting her 2 years or so ago. I have written a little note of congratulation which perhaps you will kindly forward.15 Ida Greaves received the congratulatory note from Miss Hutchins in Barbados. She had returned to the family home on the island after her graduation and was contemplating the wording of her reply to Miss

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Figure 3.2 Professors Arnold Plant and Lionel Robbins. Courtesy of the LSE Library.

Hutchins’ note. She wrote to Mrs Mair the LSE Secretary asking whether in fact Miss Hutchins was the donor of her Studentship. If so, she asked, had she been remiss in not recognising this at an earlier date? Should she have thanked Miss Hutchins for her generosity? if it was merely an accident that I did not recognise her gift of the Studentship sooner, then I feel I ought to explain this to Miss Hutchins. But if the School does not usually reveal the donor, there is nothing to explain.16 She was reassured in the School’s reply that she had not been at fault in any way. It was in accordance with Miss Hutchins’ own wishes at the foundation of the Studentship that her role as donor was not generally announced to holders, though she liked to be informed of their progress from time to time. We can assume that Miss Greaves went on to pen an appropriate and grateful reply to the congratulatory note sent to her by her benefactor at LSE. She had returned home to Barbados in August 1934, immediately following completion of her much-praised doctoral studies. Sadly there is no reason to believe that she was offered any teaching or research posts in London, despite the success of her PhD. Ten years were to elapse before she returned to England during World War II, to take up a research post at the Colonial Office.

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Notes 1 Irwin Collier, “Economics in the Rear View Mirror” http://www.irwincollier. com Archival Artifacts from the History of Economics. 2 Radcliffe College Record of Ida Cecil Greaves, Issued January 1932. 3 “I should like if I am eligible to apply for one of the Research Studentships open at the School in the Autumn … I now want to start work on a PhD thesis, and I should be glad to be able to do it at London”, Ida Greaves to the LSE Secretary, May 1932. 4 Its recent mission statement acknowledges past injustices: The College recognizes that racial justice and equity are foundation values, and that work to achieve them is urgent as well as an ongoing priority, The College’s early history in particular was marked by racist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic thought, statements, and actions, most prominently – but certainly not exclusively – in the public statements, private letters, and discriminatory admissions and hiring actions of Dr. M. Carey Thomas during her tenure as Academic Dean and President from the College’s founding until 1922. (Mission Statement, https://www.brynmawr.edu) 5 “Bryn Mawr, Catholic Economics Instructor threatened with Termination, 1921”, Irwin Collier, HTTP://www.irwincollier.com Irwin Collier comments, “When I came across the correspondence in this post, what caught my eye was that a Colombia doctoral student in economics had written to her adviser asking for advice in the face of a seemingly certain termination of her instructorship at Bryn Mawr solely on the grounds of being a Catholic. I thought it good to post a reminder just how broad the category of ‘the Other’ was not even a century ago”. 6 His position at the Pan American Union may have been instrumental in gaining an invitation for Ida Greaves to be the speaker at the conference in Puerto Rica in 1957, which effectively ended her academic career. See Postscript P? 7 Ellen Wilkinson was a strong advocate of women’s rights. After graduating from the University of Manchester in 1913, she took on paid work with the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). In the early 1930s when Betty Archdale became her private secretary, Ellen Wilkinson was out of office, having lost her Middlesborough seat in 1931. Out of office she was highly active, widely known as a journalist and writer of strong radical persuasions. She was re-elected as a Labour MP in 1935, for the Jarrow constituency. Betty Archdale accompanied Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow march of the unemployed in 1936, which presented the petition of the people of Jarrow to the House of Commons. 8 Letter from Ida Greaves to Lucy Mair, October 22, 1932 (LSE student files). 9 Sessional Reports for Ida Greaves, 1932–33 and 1933–34 (LSE student files). 10 In 1932 Arnold Plant had two doctoral research students, both engaged on development-related projects. One student was Ida Greaves. The other student was directly involved in research into the South African labour market, the topic was “The South African Native as an Industrial Worker” (LSE Student Files). 11 Autobiographical Account of Sir Arthur Lewis (“W. Arthur Lewis”, Lives of the Laureates: Seven Nobel Economists) (1986), edited by William Breit and Roger W. Spencer, pp. 1–19, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 12 Information on the career of Arnold Plant is from Ronald Coase, “Professor Arnold Plant: His Ideas and Influence” in M.A.Anderson ed. (1986), The

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Unfinished Agenda: Essays in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Ronald Coase entered LSE in 1929 to study for the B.Com degree. In his Nobel speech, (1991), he related how in 1931 he “had a great stroke of luck. Arnold Plant was appointed Professor of Commerce … He was a wonderful teacher. I began to attend his seminar … It was a revelation”. Letter from the Registrar to Miss Hutchins (Donor of the Women’s Studentship) reporting the opinion of Professor Plant August 1934, LSE Student Files. Letter from Arnold Plant supporting the nomination of Ida Greaves for the Hutchinson Medal, November 1934, LSE Student Files. Letter from Miss Hutchins to the Registrar, LSE, September 2, 1934. LSE Student Files. Letter from Ida Greaves to Lucy Mair, School Secretary, November 26, 1934. (LSE Student Files).

References Anderson, M.A. (ed.) (1986) The Unfinished Agenda: Essays in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London, Institute of Economic Affairs Breit, William and Roger W. Spencer (1986) Lives of the Laureates: Seven Nobel Economists, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T Press Bryn Mawr College “Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism” https://.brynmawr.edu/ equity-inclusion-and-anti-racism Collier, Irwin “Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, Bryn Mawr Catholic Economics Instructor Threatened with Termination, 1921”, http://www. irwincollier.com Collier, Irwin “Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, Harvard, Nine Radcliffe Students Petition to Attend Economics Seminary, 1926”, http://www. irwincollier.com Haberler, Gottfried von (1936) The Theory of International Trade, London, William Hodge & Company, Ltd London School of Economics, Archives of the Academic Registrar’s Office: Student Files for Ida Greaves, includes her application papers, with transcripts and references, sessional reports, plus testimonials from Arnold Plant who was her supervisor. Taussig, F.W. (1927), International Trade Tilman, Rick (2008) “John R.Commons, the New Deal and the American Tradition of Empirical Collectivism”, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 823–861

4

Modern Production among Backward Peoples (1935)

Ida Greaves’s doctoral thesis was published by George Allen and Unwin in 1935 in the LSE Series, Studies in Economics and Commerce. It was edited by three distinguished professors at the School – Arnold Plant, Lionel Robbins and A.J. Sargent. The three editors reported to the University that the excellent thesis which Miss I.C. Greaves prepared for her PhD has been accepted for inclusion in the School’s series of ‘Studies in Economics and Commerce’. All three of the editors, (Professors Plant, Robbins and Sargent) think unusually highly of the work.1 The book was re-printed in 1968 by the New York publishers, Augustus M. Kelley, in their Reprint series, Economics Classics. But if the cynical definition of a “classic” is a book which everyone talks about but no-one reads, then Ida Greaves’ book did not reach even this lowly standard. On publication in 1935, it sank virtually without trace, and it has remained largely in obscurity ever since. It is difficult to find any references to her book in the emerging development economics literature in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, it was not acknowledged in any of Arthur Lewis’s books or papers, even though both were economists interested in labour supply in agriculture in developing countries, and worked together as economic advisers in the Colonial Office during World War II. They had even shared the same doctoral supervisor at LSE in Arnold Plant, albeit at different dates. There are a number of possible reasons why Modern Production among Backward Peoples failed to secure a place in the early development literature. Certainly it appeared in print at a difficult time. Although the book was reviewed in major journals at the time, academic life in Britain was shortly to be severely disrupted by preparations for war. Many senior academics at LSE were redirected to war service and the School itself was relocated in a skeleton form to Peterhouse in Cambridge. Since Ida Greaves had already left London in 1934 for Barbados and the United States, she was in no DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-4

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position herself to publicise her work and capitalise upon the success of her doctoral research at the School. There were other factors at play. According to the three editors, Ida Greaves doctoral thesis had undergone “slight modifications” for publication. Among those modifications was a change in title. The thesis itself had been submitted under the title The Organisation of Labour in Tropical Agriculture. However, for the book itself Ida Greaves for some reason revived the title she had provided initially in 1932 for her proposed doctoral research programme at LSE. In the application which she submitted to LSE, her research proposal had the title “Economic Development of the ’Backward Races’ and its Relation to International Trade”. The Dean of Postgraduate Studies at LSE had requested a revised title for her proposed research, suggesting instead one which was appropriate to a more “factual and neutral” contribution to the body of knowledge on tropical agriculture. In response, Ida Greaves amended the title of her PhD research topic to “The Organisation of Labour in Tropical Agriculture”.2 This was the title of the thesis as it went forward for examination. However, she clearly regarded her thesis with its significant behavioural and institutional underpinnings, as something more than a study of labour organisation in tropical agriculture. This is possibly why she reverted to her original thesis title for the book, replacing races with peoples, removing the inverted commas around backward races and deleting the reference to international trade. Changes in title are not unusual when research monographs are destined for publication. The author and publishers hope thereby that the change of title will attract the attention of a wider audience. But the title Ida Greaves gave her book, Modern Production among Backward Peoples, was problematic in itself. Its reference to backward peoples may have been responsible, in part at least, for the fact that over the years such a remarkable economics classic has remained so little known and read. To later readers, its title suggests an ethnographic or even antiquarian interest, rather than a contribution to development economics. An early review of her book, by Austin Robinson in the Economic Journal (1935), described the title of the book as “a trifle misleading”.3 He suggested that the author had confined her study to problems of agriculture, whereas “modern production” as in the title should have referred to a range of activities including mining. Austin Robinson appears to have found nothing unacceptable in the book’s reference to backward peoples, from which we may conclude that the terminology was unremarkable in the 1930s. However, things had certainly changed by the 1950s and 1960s when development economics came of age. Underdeveloped or developing had replaced terms such as primitive and backward, adjectives which had come to be regarded as shameful, or even racist.

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The title of Ida Greaves’ book with its reference to backward peoples probably did nothing to recommend it to post-war academics and popular audiences. Many would have been dissuaded from exploring the contents of a book with such an outmoded title. The development economist Peter Bauer, writing in the early 1970s, was himself aware of the pitfalls associated with the descriptive term backward in the context of developing countries: Poor, or materially backward, are the most appropriate expressions: they best describe the condition which serves as a basis of classification; they best convey the fact that distinction is simply a matter of degree; and they are neutral, in the sense that they do not suggest that the condition described is abnormal or reprehensible … But despite his reservations Bauer conceded that in his own writings he had wisely [relied] largely on the term underdeveloped because it is the one most widely used in the literature … it would be laboured or pedantic to ignore a term so widely used in this general context.4 Writing in the 1930s, of course, Ida Greaves pre-dated the post-war rise of development economics. However, any reader who had taken the trouble to go beyond the title, to read and digest her book, would have been surprised. In fact, the book presented a rare and outspoken critique of the way indigenous people in tropical areas were assumed to be primitive, even backward, in the literature. Significantly in her application to LSE, when describing her proposed scheme of research, Ida Greaves had placed the phrase backward races in inverted commas, thereby denoting what was for her the problematic and disparaging nature of the term.5 The inverted commas had somehow disappeared in the title of the published book. In the second chapter of her book, she posed the question: What are the criteria of backwardness … Is the savage to be identified by nudity of body or blankness of mind? Is pigmentation a better guide to cultural status than more intangible qualities? Or is it power that is the measure of the superiority of the new civilisations of Europe over the old civilisations of the tropics? … According to the Covenant of the League [of Nations] the backward races are those ‘unable to stand alone under the strenuous conditions of modern life’ and this is the situation of subordinate minorities in Europe as well as subordinate majorities in Africa, and if they were left

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alone they would not find the conditions of life so strenuous. As for the criterion the savages understanding of elementary economic principles is very limited, this would exclude many leading social reformers from the ranks of civilization. (Modern Production Among Backward Peoples, op. cit. p. 35) Ida Greaves was explicitly rejecting the Marshallian view which assumed that people in “primitive” or “backward” societies were the antithesis of “economic man”. She quoted directly from Marshall’s Principles of Economics in her own book (op. cit. p. 37) citing his description of peoples in the tropics as savages [living] under the dominion of custom and impulse; scarcely ever striking out new lines for themselves; never forecasting the distant future; fitful in spite of their servitude to custom, governed by the fancy of the moment; ready at times for the most arduous exertions, but incapable of keeping themselves long to steady work. Laborious and tedious tasks are avoided as far as possible; those which are inevitable are done by the compulsory labour of women. [Marshall’s Principles] This quotation from Marshall was taken by Ida Greaves from the Eighth Edition of his Principles of Economics. Although Marshall’s Principles had first appeared in 1890, it was still a leading textbook in universities in the 1920s. Principles had been republished as the Eighth Edition in 1920, and the quotation from Marshall, in which he described the “savage”, was still widely acceptable in the inter-war period. When Ida Greaves went on to claim that “homo oeconomicus” (economic man) was essentially the same in all societies she was going against a key assumption of Marshallian economics. To inveigh so strongly against Marshallian orthodoxy was quite remarkable from one so young and in the context of a PhD thesis in the 1930s. She wrote: Economics is concerned with mankind in the ordinary business of life, whether the business is conducted in a furskin or a frock coat, or without them. Except in a few biblical instances, humanity has not obtained sustenance without effort; and the relation of the means to the ends of living which this effort represents is the substance of economic analysis. Means and ends vary in different places at the present time, and have varied in the same place at different times; and while it is not admissible to judge one economy by the standards of valuation of another, this does not mean that separate frameworks of theory have to be devised for them … (Modern Production among Backward Peoples op. cit. p. 37)

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Modern Production among Backward Peoples Homo oeconomicus is essentially the same in every type of society, and to treat him as varying in character because the concrete manifestations of his impulses and satisfactions differ in time and place is to invite a needless confusion of thought. It is the function of fulfilling wants, not the phenomenon of fulfilment, that is an economic concept. … (Modern Production among Backward Peoples op.cit. p. 37)

If homo oeconomicus is the same in all types of society, what then distinguishes the developed economy from the “primitive” economy? Again, Ida Greaves has an answer which foreshadows much of what would come to be argued in later development literature. “Capitalism” features in poor societies, just as in rich countries, but it is the form of capital which differs: Any tool or instrument used to assist labour in production is capital, whether it is a digging stick broken on the way to work and then discarded afterwards, a spear carefully fashioned by the owner and inalienably his forever, or a machine used by a succession of hired labourers who have no share in its ownership … The characteristic they all have in common is that they make the productivity of labour greater than it would have been if employed alone … (Modern Production among Backward Peoples op.cit. p. 40) What then differentiates capital in poor, agricultural economies from familiar forms of capital in industrialised economies? An advanced economic system is simply one in which the accumulation of capital and the invention of capital-goods make the process of production roundabout instead of direct, and the division of labour increases its efficiency; while a primitive system is one in which the relative deficiency of capital keeps the productive process direct, or from hand to mouth, and there is little specialised production for exchange, and hence only limited and clumsy media of exchange. (Modern Production among Backward Peoples, op.cit. p. 40) All tropical countries lack “roundabout” capital when compared with advanced countries but tropical countries can usefully be divided into two types, depending on the relative supplies of land and labour: While economic organization everywhere in the tropics is characterized by a lack of capital relative to that of Europe, it is itself divided into two types by variations in the relative supplies of land and labour in different places. In consequence we find what may be described as an African type of economy – although it is found also in other thinly

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populated areas such as New Guinea and Fiji – in which the population is very sparse in relation to the land on which it lives; and the Oriental type which is characterized by a very dense population on limited land. Both differ from the distribution of agricultural labour in European economy, the African having less and the Oriental having more. But the lack of capital equipment in both is responsible for a low standard of living which leads investors to expect cheap labour, and for an inefficient technique which seems by the measure of an advanced economy to waste valuable sources of wealth. (Modern Production among Backward Peoples, op. cit. p. 44) Ida Greaves drew a distinction in her book, between plantation and peasant systems of cultivation. She then took the distinction further to expand upon the relationship between plantation systems as such and underdevelopment. Hence, she made reference in her proposed scheme of research to LSE, to her intention to study the implications of different methods of production for international trade. In this respect, she was very much a pioneer, pre-dating by some thirty years or more the “Plantation School” of social scientists in development studies.6 The methods of cultivation practised in the tropics can be broadly classified as plantation and peasant systems of production. The plantation is entirely a feature of European penetration and development from the sixteenth century to the present time, and has been based on the grant of extensive lands to foreign owners. The peasant, a communal cultivator, though becoming to an increasing extent an individual landowner … he has become, under the influence of foreign contacts, a producer for export … (Modern Production among Backward Peoples op. cit. p. 67) The question as to why export crops are in some instances produced on plantations, and in other instances by peasant producers, is critical she argues. But it is misleading, as many do, to focus solely on the superior technology of the plantation system, which could be provided only by foreign investors. The single factor of capital requirements does not explain the distinct geographical differentiation in the system of cultivating some of the same crops, nor provide the reason why a plantation and factory should operate in some places through contracts with smallholders, and in other places work its own land with hired labour. We must look to other factors [to determine] why cacao should be eminently suitable for peasants in West Africa, be monopolized by plantations in Ceylon and

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The “other factors”, which Ida Greaves identified as explanations for the distribution of peasant versus plantation crops in tropical regions, demonstrated both her respect for the differing historical experiences of regions within the tropical world and her continuing allegiance to institutional perspectives as influences on economic behaviour. Legal institutions, particularly conditions of land tenure, were of huge importance. The attitude of governments to land tenure was a primary factor in determining the system of production. Where large grants of land were made to its own settlers by a foreign government which established control over a tropical region, a system was established which has determined the form of development for centuries. The influence of the Conquistadores is still to be seen very clearly in South America, and the plantation system of the West Indies is based on the Royal Patents of the seventeenth century. Such grants were made for the purpose of extending national power abroad, and of obtaining profitable raw materials … The establishment of the cultivation of revenue crops by large numbers of peasants is as much a political characteristic of twentieth century politics as the establishment of the plantation system was of seventeenth century policy … Peasant cultivation has succeeded because it was government policy that it should … The Gold Coast is a territory of active smallholders instead of a country of dormant large ones like Brazil because it became British policy in the twentieth century to develop native landowners as well as native land. (op. cit. pp. 84–85) In 1972, almost forty years after the publication of Ida Greaves’ book, George Beckford of the University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, published his own pioneering study of underdevelopment in the plantation economies of the world.7 It was an approach to development studies which stressed the need for an understanding of the institutional environment. Recalling for us the earlier approach of Ida Greaves, Beckford argued that it is necessary to probe beyond the observation that underdevelopment derives from shortages of capital and skills and from the use of

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backward techniques. In order to find out why these conditions exist (and persist) one must explore the social and economic environment … The process of economic development itself involves much more than increasing the rates of technological change and of capital accumulation … Economics alone cannot explain the development process, and the need for political economy is reasserting itself. (Beckford, 1972, op.cit. Introduction) Although Beckford was the leader of the radical Caribbean “Plantation School” of social scientists he was always ready to acknowledge the influence of others, particularly fellow Caribbean writers such as Lloyd Best and Norman Girvan, and the wider group of Latin American structuralists led by Celso Furtado.8 Beckford is also unique, as far as I am aware, in also citing the influence of Ida Greaves’ early work, and generous in pointing out her particular contribution in tying the plantation system into the export of metropolitan capital and enterprise.9 Whether under a plantation or a peasant-based form of organisation, the supply of labour is central to economics. Chapter fourth chapter of Ida Greaves’ book is devoted to the determinants of labour supply in tropical export economies. Making no use of formal economic models it presents a remarkably full and detailed account of different labour markets in tropical regions, referencing a variety of historical and institutional forces underpinning labour supply, and arguing that because “the attitude of indigenous tropical peoples to labour under foreign stimulus is not everywhere the same” (op. cit. p. 117) no single supply schedule could cover all cases. Some [indigenous peoples] have been familiar with capitalistic economy longer than others; the natural resources of various regions differ greatly, with a consequent variety of opportunities for employment; and the experience of different tribes and communities of foreign contacts has differed widely, leaving a corresponding difference of effect upon the native attitude to employment The analysis of labour supply in chapter four ranges widely over the experiences of different peoples: pastoralists such as the Masai in East Africa, Singalese and Chinese peasant producers in Asia, migrant workers from the Indian sub-continent, and indigenous labourers in the settler economies of the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Africa. In each case, labour supply is argued to be predominantly under historical influences, albeit allowing for later contemporary conditions including the political regulation of labour by colonial governments. Particular attention is paid to those peoples “whose attitude to working for a master has been

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conditioned by recent enslavement”. For them, a common legacy is that wage employment is often regarded with the same aversion as slavery, possibly also with little enthusiasm even for enterprise on own account. The treatment of labour supply in chapter four is remarkably thorough and thought-provoking. It does not evade difficult issues of the 1930s, and bravely tackles the malign influences on labour supply arising from three centuries of European expansion. Policies discussed include racist settler doctrines in South Africa and Kenya; regulations discouraging Chinese and Indian immigrants into certain colonial territories; compulsory labour requisitioned for public works and military service; and the imposition of cash taxes compelling indigenous people to work for wages or sell commodities which they have produced under native enterprise. For any development economist, Ida Greaves’ approach to labour supply in tropical regions invites comparison with the Lewis model of the early 1950s. The labour surplus model of Lewis assumes a single supply schedule covering all cases, with a perfectly elastic supply of labour available to the capitalist sector at the prevailing subsistence wage rate. This is not how Ida Greaves approached the problematic nature of labour supply in tropical areas, when she invoked a wide range of historical and institutional determinant of labour supply. It is true of course that Lewis did not set out to present a historically accurate picture of labour supply in developing countries. His objective was to develop a model of capital accumulation in the transition out of subsistence agriculture. But this is not how his model has been used, or rather misused, in development economics, where it has encouraged an over-simplified and frequently misleading treatment of a complex issue. In so many respects, Modern Production among Backward Peoples was a path-breaking study of development and underdevelopment, set firmly within the historical experience of European colonial expansion. Certainly it was a unique pioneering study in the emerging discipline of development economics and was highly regarded by three distinguished professors at LSE. So why did the book, and its author, sink into obscurity? There is no simple answer to this question. There were two named reviews in principal economic journals: by Austin Robinson in the Economic Journal and by W. H. Hutt in Economica. There were two “anonymous” reviews in International Affairs and in the Journal of the Royal African Society. There may be other reviews which I have not traced. All four reviews offered positive support to the book. Bearing in mind the imprimatur of three well known LSE professors it could hardly be otherwise. However none of the reviewers took seriously the novel themes of the book, though Cambridge economist Austin Robinson possibly came the closest. To Austin Robinson, the book was “especially welcome” because it filled a gap in our knowledge of “problems of adjustment which arise

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51

when backward people are brought suddenly into the sphere of the modern productive system” (Economic Journal, December 1935, p. 768). Robinson found the discussion of estate production versus peasant cultivation “most interesting” and appeared to accept though did not discuss Ida Greaves’ conclusion that “when all is said, economic forces are often less important than historical ones”. Unfortunately, most of Austin Robinson’s review dealt with the less striking features of the book. He wrote at some length about the technical problems arising out of the introduction of roundabout, capitalistic methods of production, a matter largely downplayed in Ida Greaves book. Sadly, Robinson did not discuss the thought-provoking themes of the book, a task for which he would have been ably qualified. The review by W.H. Hutt in Economica (August 1936. p. 347) was also favourable, describing the book as “a much needed study” of a subject which has so far “received more attention from anthropologists, administrators and politicians than from economists … the book is especially welcome for that reason”. However, most of his review was devoted to an alternative “leisure preference” model of labour supply in tropical areas, which assumed a high preference for leisure on the part of indigenous peoples: To increase wage rates would frequently mean a decline, not a rise in the supply of labour coming forward, for the native could then purchase his leisure with greater ease. This is not a model of labour supply to which Ida Greaves would have subscribed. It is not in the spirit of her book. Nor did the leisure preference model, sometime described as the “lazy savage hypothesis”, come to have much traction in the discipline of development economics in later years. Significantly, not one of the four reviewers attempted to place the book appropriately within the contemporary economics discipline. Although Ida Greaves claimed in her Preface that she intended to use economic analysis to deal with its subject matter, the book’s idiosyncratic blend of classical political economy, history and institutional factors was probably not the orthodox treatment which readers might have been led to expect, especially one emanating from the London School of Economics. Her approach to the subject was highly individualistic. There was no school of thought to which it could be assigned and no identifiable group of colleagues pursuing similar ideas. To this may be added the observation that the book is not an easy read. Various passages needed to be read and reread with care in order to appreciate the subtlety of the themes being pursued.

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Notes 1 LSE Student Files for Ida Greaves, November 26, 1934 2 Archives of the Academic Registrar’s Office: LSE ( 1932), Documents relating to Ida Greaves Research Proposal and Change of Title. 3 Robinson, Austin (December, 1935) Review of “Modern Production among Backward Peoples” by I.C. Greaves, Economic Journal, Vol. 45, No. 180, pp. 768–771. 4 Bauer, P.T. ( 1971) Dissenr on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, p. 25. 5 Ida Greaves Student File, LSE, September, 1932. Subject of Research: The History of the Economic Development of “Backward Races” and its Relation to International Trade. 6 Ida Greaves was convinced, at the very outset of her research at LSE, of the importance of the distinction she had observed between peasant and plantation production in South Africa, West Africa and the Caribbean. Her student file contains a detailed account of the PhD research which she proposed to carry out. She wrote that she was seeking an explanation of why the same agricultural commodities were being produced for international markets in these regions under different methods of production. Which in the long run, she asked, would be of the greatest benefit for economic progress? 7 George L. Beckford (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in plantation economies of the Third World New York, Oxford University Press. 8 Best, Lloyd (1968) “Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy”, Social and Economic Studies, September Girvan, Norman (1970), “Multinational Corporations and Dependent Underdevelopment in Mineral-Export Economies”, Social and Economic Studies, September. 9 Beckford (1972) p. 11 & p. 35. I am grateful to Emeritus Professor Mark Figueroa, of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, for drawing my attention to Beckford’s acknowledgement of Ida Greaves.

References Bauer, P.T. (1971) Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics, London, Weidenfield and Nicholson Beckford, George L. (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in the Plantation Economies of the Third World, New York, Oxford University Press Greaves, I.C. (1935) Modern Production among Backward Peoples, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Reprinted, 1968, by Augustus M Kelley, New York Hill, Polly (1963) The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana, Cambridge, at the University Press Hill, Polly (1970), Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa, Cambridge, at the University Press Hutt, W.H. (1936) Review of Greaves, I.C. Modern Production among Backward Peoples, in Economica, August, Vol. 3, No.11, pp. 347–348

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London School of Economics, Archives of the Academic Registrar’s Office: Documents relating to Ida Greaves original research proposal, and the change in title (1932) Robinson, Austin (1935) Review of Greaves, I.C. Modern Production among Backward Peoples, Economic Journal, Vol. 45, No. 180, pp. 768–771

5

American Interlude

Ida Greaves had already left London by the time her doctoral thesis was published in 1935. She had sailed from Dover in the summer of 1934 at the end of the University of London academic year, arriving at her father’s home in Barbados in August. There is no evidence to suggest that she had applied for or had been offered any teaching or research employment in Britain following on from her postgraduate studies. She did not return to London until 1943 when she was appointed to carry out research in the Colonial Office. Later she would take up a temporary teaching post at the London School of Economics. What happened to her career in the years between 1934 is and 1943 is not always clear, and of necessity there is more speculation in this chapter than would otherwise be the case. Between 1935 and 1943, she was in the United States. The academic posts she held in the United States, at Iowa State College and Barnard College, were not prestigious. She maintained her research interests, particularly those concerned with colonial policy and labour supply in the plantation and peasant export economies. Always anxious to progress her research, she specified a strong interest in colonial monetary policy in her contacts with the Colonial Office and Arnold Plant in London. Her correspondence with Arnold Plant dates from the immediate post-war period. It reveals her as a witty, wry and outspoken critic of prominent policy-makers in the era of decolonisation. Her second career in the United States took off in September 1935 when she arrived in New York en-route for her new appointment at Iowa State College. She had travelled to New York from Para in Brazil. It is not clear why she had gone to Brazil from her father’s home in Barbados, but it may have been linked to family connections and possibly also to her longstanding research interests in the early sugar industry, which was located in Brazil around Para on the northeast coast. On arrival in the United States, this time there was no prestigious Fellowship ahead at Radcliffe College, as had been the case in 1929 on leaving McGill. Instead there was a teaching post in introductory economics at Iowa State College. In the DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-5

American Interlude 55 1930s, Iowa State College was a college of agriculture and it is likely that her doctoral research topic on labour supply in tropical agriculture was instrumental in securing the appointment. The post was in the Department of Economics and Sociology in the Faculty of Rural Science. There were Professors and Associate Professors in the Department but her post was at the introductory level of Instructor. Her subject was “Consumption Economics”. Nothing has come to light about her appointment at Iowa State College, but she stayed there for four years, which suggests that she was reasonably happy there. If the teaching was undemanding, it would leave time for research. Her research interests centred on colonial policy, highlighting its negative impact on material progress in tropical areas in the 20s and 30s. In 1936, she published a remarkable paper in the Journal, Foreign Affairs. The Journal was, and is, the major publication of the US Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921, the Council is the American body which specialises in United States foreign policy and international relations. It is avowedly independent and non-partisan, with a board comprising senior politicians, lawyers and academics. In its early days of publication, the journal did not have many female authors. Its present-day publicity quotes only one female contributor from the 30s. This was the distinguished American journalist for Time magazine, Dorothy Thompson, who contributed articles to Foreign Affairs in the late 1930s. Ida Greaves as a female author was unusual in having an article accepted for publication in the 1930s. At 29 years of age, she was also a remarkably youthful contributor. The article expressed her great concern about the expansionary claims in the interwar period of countries like Italy, Japan and Germany period. She saw Japan’s excursions into Manchuria, Italy’s into Ethiopia, and Germany’s claims to her lost colonies, as very disturbing developments. Her major focus of concern was countries that she termed the “lenient critics,” Britain, France, Netherlands, possibly even some lobbyists in the United States. These were the “haves” in terms of empire, prepared to justify excursions into imperialism by others, on spurious economic grounds. The strenuous reiteration of the dogma that dense population, paucity of natural resources, or any other kind of national impoverishment, makes overseas colonies an “economic necessity” for the great Power in which these conditions develop, indicates a remarkable change of opinion from that of little more than fifty years ago, when the prospect of colonial acquisitions was anathema to good nationalists in Europe.1 Her argument was that in earlier times, most sensible opinion recognised that colonies were financial liabilities, rather than assets. At the beginning

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of the twentieth century over-supply and the development of synthetic substitutes for many tropical products had resulted in “hard work for little gain”. Then, later in the difficult trading conditions of the 30s, imperial preference meant that Britain and France paid prices 25% to 100% higher than the open market price, for products sourced from within their own empires. Colonial development also required large expenditure on capital account. She cites the $20 million required to construct the Kenya railway, a “still unrefunded cost”, and the annual subsidy of more than one million florins which the Netherlands government was obliged to contribute to the budget of the East Indies (Greaves, 1936 op. cit. p. 633). The conclusion of the article was clear and unambiguous. The territorial claims which are being made in the name of economic necessity today are only a pseudo-rational disguise for political motives. What the “needy” nations [Germany, Italy and Japan] really want is an extension of their respective areas of national autarchy. To this end economic calculations are entirely subsidiary. (op. cit. p. 638) Ida Greaves, settled in Iowa, was writing this article in the middle of the “hungry thirties” following on from the plunge in the prices of tropical primary products. It was a prescient piece of writing, a forethought of the problems which lay ahead in Europe and Asia. She anticipated what Tony Hopkins has described as the “subsidized and protected imperial economies that in different degrees were to characterize Britain and France for the remainder of the colonial period”.2 Her paper was directed at an American audience and chimed in with a large body of US opinion. Although the United States still held its island territories in the Pacific and Caribbean (principally the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii), the Democrats were effectively in power in the White House from 1933 to 1953, and the Party was officially opposed to colonial acquisitions. Roosevelt’s key advisers, the New Deal economists, lacked enthusiasm for empire, and tended to sympathise with the development ambitions of nationalists in colonial dependencies. Many of his advisers would be characterised in later years as “institutionalist economists”, academics and policy-makers with whom Ida Greaves had much in common.3 Ida Greaves’ interest in the links between imperialism and development was a driving force in her research ambitions. To this end, she applied in 1937 to the US Social Science Research Council based in New York City, for a Grant-in-Aid to finance a study of the economic basis of imperialism. The Social Science Research Council was a multi-disciplinary body of senior academics encompassing anthropology, sociology, history and

American Interlude 57 political science, as well as economics. Arnold Plant, still at the London School of Economics, supplied a supportive reference: I feel that Dr Greaves is undoubtedly fully qualified to undertake this important work. Her previous volume is evidence of her capacity to treat important questions with the requisite breadth combined with analytical power.4 There is no record of the outcome of the application but it is reasonable to assume from the absence of further information that her application was unsuccessful. Ida Greaves’ other related research interest at this time was labour supply in tropical areas. She was one of the first economists to take on the contrasting experience of plantation and peasant export economics. She had been invited by the University of Chicago Press in 1937 to review a book authored by sociologist Andrew Lind surveying the occupations and productivity of different population groups in Hawaii. Her substantial review of the book was published in the Journal of Farm Economics in 1938. Probably her role as an economics lecturer at Iowa State College with its strong agricultural focus had prompted the invitation to review the book.5 Her Review is interesting in that it provided her with an opportunity to comment on the growth of sugar cane plantations in Hawaii and contrast the experience with that of the West Indies. Explaining the different experiences of Hawaii and the West Indies, her Review suggested that (contrary to the argument of Andrew Lind) historical and political factors took precedence over technology. Plantations in Hawaii had emerged after 1850, supplying a new market in the States consequent upon the Californian Gold Rush. Looking at the situation in Hawaii after 1850 she wrote: slavery by then was obsolete; absentee ownership had lost its old attractions … while the old plantation colonies struggled to repair the wreckage of the former system of slavery, monopoly and privilege, the Hawaiian pioneers had to make an entirely new start. Hence agricultural development in Hawaii has been characterized by local ownership, the importation of large numbers of labourers on wage contracts, extensive capital investment in specialized production techniques, and constant scientific research. (Greaves, 1939 op. cit.) Her interest in the history of the sugar industry may well have been stimulated by that visit she had made in 1935 to northeast Brazil. Not

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much was known in the early 1930s about the beginnings of the Brazilian sugar industry. It had attracted little in the way of academic research. From her Barbadian background, however, Ida Greaves would have been familiar with the history. Under Portuguese settlement, and later under the Dutch, the sugar industry had transformed northeast Brazil. Between 1550 and 1660, the Brazilian sugar estates were the leading producers of sugar in the Atlantic trading system. Then the primacy passed to the Caribbean. By the 1640s, sugar was on sale in Barbados. The beginning of the sugar industry in Barbados is attributed to Jewish migrants who had been heavily involved in the Brazilian sugar industry. They fled Brazil for Barbados when the Portuguese colonists regained control of the countryside from the Dutch. Stuart B. Schwartz (2005) has shown the importance of institutional finance from the metropolis, in Brazil’s sugar industry. This accords with the emphasis Ida Greaves placed on the role of finance in maritime enterprise: “It was the wealth of distant tropical lands … that lies at the basis of modern imperialism” (chapter 1 of her Modern Production among Backward Peoples). Finance came initially via religious orders such as the Jesuits who founded plantations. They were unusual as investors in that they were obliged to plough back their profits into missionary and educational activities. Alongside the larger plantations of the Jesuits in Brazil were many small family-based Portuguese settler estates of five to ten acres. At the start, the Brazilian sugar industry did not depend on slave labour. Small-scale farmers lacked the finance necessary to import African labour. But, by the end of the period in the 1660s, labourers in the Brazilian sugar industry were wholly African or Afro-Brazilian slave labourers. Ida Greaves in her Review stressed the important role played in the Hawaiian sugar industry by institutional investors. The first owners of plantations in Hawaii were not Jesuits but Protestant missionaries. By the 1930s, it was the grandchildren of these early missionaries who controlled over 90% of the sugar output. With the abolition of slavery, the planters of Hawaii had been obliged to rely on organised immigration of Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricon, Portuguese and Filipino labourers to supplement meagre supplies of local labour. Immigrant labour proved to be costly and difficult to retain, but this was compensated in part by tariff free entry of sugar into the United States, following the signing of the reciprocal trade treaty in 1875. Under the terms of the treaty sugar entered the US free of duty. Sugar was the most valuable import into the United States at that time. The tariff on imports from outside the US colonies ensured that other potential low-cost suppliers were excluded from the US market. From her paper in Foreign Affairs and her application for funding to study the economic basis of imperialism, we can safely assume that

American Interlude 59 research still played a key role in the years Ida Greaves spent at Iowa State College. She was there for four years until 1939. Then she was offered a temporary teaching post at the highly regarded Barnard College in New York City. Barnard College was a women’s private liberal arts college affiliated to Columbia University, founded by Annie Nathan Meyer in 1889 as a response to the then all-male Columbia University. Ida Greaves’ appointment was only a temporary one, providing a replacement for an outgoing professor, Harry Gideoense, who had resigned to take up another post. Again her teaching was at an elementary level, and in areas of economics for which she had little empathy and which did not play to her strengths. The Barnard College Alumnae Monthly reported: In the emergency caused by his departure, we have been fortunate in securing Dr Ida C Greaves, formerly of Iowa State College, MA McGill University and PhD London School of Economics, who will conduct a section of elementary economics and offer during the first term a course in “Problems of Monopoly and Monopolistic Prices”. This will be substituted for Professor Gideonse’s Course in economic history, which will be postponed until the second year when it will be given by some other professor. The irony of the above report would not be lost on anyone familiar with Ida Greaves’ career to date, her high qualifications, her undoubted strengths in economic history and the outstanding quality of her research, all of which continued to be heavily influenced by her McGill training in institutional economics. Her temporary appointment as lecturer at Barnard College was not extended beyond its initial two terms, and as promised it ended in 1940. When her temporary teaching post at Barnard College came to an end, there were few employment opportunities elsewhere for Ida Greaves. Universities in the States, dependent on private funding, were mostly in financial difficulties arising out of the Depression. Little was on offer in the way of academic appointments even for those with significant teaching qualifications and research experience. The unemployment rate in the United States was still high at 15%, and Roosevelt’s New Deal had already run its course. At this point in her career, Ida Greaves made a declaration of intent to apply for US citizenship. It could have been a formality. A declaration of intent was a legal requirement for any persons still living in the United States within seven years of their arrival. Alternatively it could have been prompted by her increasingly precarious employment situation. Whatever the reason, there is no further information on the outcome of the declaration.

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Ida Greaves did however find further work in the Uited States when her temporary teaching post at Barnard College ended. The work was very much out of the ordinary. The little known story which follows here illustrates the impact of the fluid political and social environment in the United States during the interwar period. The starting point is New York’s Columbia University, to which Barnard College was affiliated. Columbia University was the largest and most important centre of American institutionalist economics in the interwar period.6 Prompted by the Depression, it had a pragmatic ideology, favouring a moderate degree of government intervention in the economy. It was an ideology which would have appealed to Ida Greaves. The economics department was headed by Wesley Mitchell who, like Stephen Laycock at McGill, had been a student of Thorstein Veblen at Chicago. Wesley Mitchell had joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1914 and went on to make his name in business cycle analysis. He was a founder member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The high point of institutionalist economics in the States was without doubt the New Deal, with influential figures such as Wesley Mitchell, Eveline Mabel Burns, John R. Commons and Rexford Tugwell having direct influence on Roosevelt’s policies, advocating large-scale public projects, unemployment insurance and social security to alleviate the problems of the Depression.7 Unsurprisingly, not all individuals or departments at Columbia fitted neatly into this picture. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, for example, it was widely believed that academics there had a more radical, even a Marxist agenda. Debate centred on the social science faculty, and the textbook, Man and his Changing World, authored by Teachers College academic Harold Rugg. The textbook was very popular being used by about half the social science pupils in the public school system. But in the socio-political climate of the 1930s with widespread anti-communist fears, a campaign had already grown up to ban Rugg’s textbook from the public school system, on the grounds that it was “un-American” because it promoted a strong interventionist, pro-labour and anti-advertising agenda. Critics on the right claimed that Rugg and his fellow academics at Teachers College were undermining faith in America’s free enterprise system, and indoctrinating a generation of school children. The campaign to remove such textbooks from schools and colleges was boosted by support from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The chief economic advisor to NAM was Ralph W. Robey, the Assistant Professor of Banking at Columbia University. Ralph Robey by his own admission was not aligned with the centre ground of Columbia’s institutionalists. Instead he was noted for his strong opposition to many aspects of the New Deal, precisely those policies which had the support of

American Interlude 61 a large number of academics at Columbia, not just in economics, but also in law, sociology and politics. In 1940, NAM commissioned Ralph Robey who held an appointment as their economic advisor, to abstract the social science textbooks in use in public schools to ascertain the point of view of their authors. Members of NAM and associated local communities were to be provided with the abstracts to see if they appeared to be “objectionable”. If so, pressure was to be placed on School Boards to get the textbooks removed from the curriculum. Following receipt of Robey’s reviews, a number of school boards stopped using Rugg’s textbooks on the grounds that they were critical of private enterprise. In a few communities, there were even public burnings of the book. So where does Ida Greaves fit into this story? In a letter sent from Ralph Robey to the Executive Vice-President of NAM, he named the three staff he had hired to provide the abstracts: Ida C. Greaves, Vladimir D. Kazakevich and A. Mackenzie Pope. Miss Greaves he described as “a liberal”, Kazakevich unsurprisingly as a “Marxist” and Pope as “an independent with conservative leanings”. Robey presumably believed that with three assistants from three different schools of thought, right, left and centre, the project would be above criticism. NAM itself claimed that the abstracts themselves “contain no opinions or criticisms and are completely unprejudiced”. This was not how the exercise was received by the teaching profession and other academics. High-profile critics included the Dean of New York University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Although it was acknowledged that the three assistants had done a thorough job and had found nothing that could be described as “subversive” in the textbooks, nevertheless there was widespread unease at the role of the National Association of Manufacturers in setting up such an investigation which had led to the banning of Rudd’s textbook by a number of school boards. It is not recorded whether Ida Greaves, from the centre, or her two companions from the left and right, the Marxist and the conservative, had any regrets about the work they had undertaken. Like NAM, the three assistants had walked into a hornets’ nest. They had been required to read and abstract no less than 563 secondary level social science textbooks in only three months, writing approximately half a million words. Even the critics acknowledged that the task of the anonymous reviewers had been enormous. The assistants had most certainly earned their fees. The cost to NAM of the investigation was never revealed. Ida Greaves’ availability at Barnard College was the reason for her employment on the NAM project, but what is interesting is Robey’s description of her as a “liberal” social scientist. “Liberalism” was the term widely used in the United States in the 1930s to describe the ideology

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underpinning Roosevelt’s interventionist New Deal, a fairly limited programme of infrastructural development, emergency relief and social insurance, all of which were backed by the new economics of Keynes which legitimised deficit financing. With its strong emphasis on domestic recovery, it is sometimes forgotten that there was also an important international element to the tenets of American liberalism in the thirties. Roosevelt who was US President through most of World War II was a strong advocate of the principle of co-operation between nations, as embodied in the fledgling United Nations, and avowedly against European imperialist expansion. “Liberal” as applied to Ida Greaves would have referenced not only her advocacy of government intervention in the domestic economy where needed, but also her support for the emerging international institutions. As is evident in her correspondence discussed in Chapter 6, Ida Greaves was optimistic about the potential for developing countries of the newly established United Nations. But her own experience of working in the unfortunately named “Department of Non-Self Governing Territories” would lead her to become a strong critic of the bureaucratic and selfserving tendencies of many of its personnel. Notes 1 Ida C. Greaves (1936) A Modern Colonial Fallacy, Foreign Affairs, p. 627. 2 For an account of United States attitudes to colonialism under Roosevelt’s New Deal, see A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History, Chapter 11, pp. 521–529. 3 One of Roosevelt’s advisors was a prominent institutional economist, Rex Tugwell. In 1944, Roosevelt appointed him governor of Puerto Rico, where he worked with Puerto Ricon nationalists to draw up a development plan. He encountered considerable opposition from vested interests, was described as a dangerous “Red”, and in 1949 he was investigated by the House’s Un-American Activities Committee. See Hopkins, op. cit. pp. 529–530. 4 Ida Greaves Student File, LSE, July 1937. 5 I.C. Greaves ( 1938) Review of An Island Community – Ecological Succession in Hawaii, by Andrew Lind, Journal of Farm Economics: Vol. 20, No. 4, November. Sugar cultivation under the plantation system, in Brazil, Barbados, Hawaii and elsewhere, was a long-standing research interest of Ida Greaves. 6 Columbia had a concentration of institutionalist economists, but institutionalists could also be found in other schools and departments, including Business, Law, Philosophy and Sociology. It retained pre-eminence in institutional economics until the late 1940s. What was then perceived as its weakness in theory led to the recruitment of economists of strong neo-classical persuasions. See Malcolm Rutherford, Institutional Economics at Columbia University, History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 31–78 Spring. 7 Eveline Mabel Burns is very much neglected as a twentieth century economist. Like Ida Greaves, she had a distinguished academic career, and under the New Deal she played a key role in establishing the United States social security

American Interlude 63 system. Her credentials as an institutional economist have been highlighted by Sherry Davis Kasper ( 2012) Evaline Mabel Burns: The Neglected Contributions of a Social Security Pioneer, Journal of History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press.

References Cusworth, Hannah (2005) Book Review: The Social Studies Wars, http://www. politeia.net/newsletter_July Gay, Rick (2003) “The Robey Investigation” Paper Presented at The Learning Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, July Greaves, Ida C. (1936) Modern Colonial Fallacy, Foreign Affairs, July, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 626–638 Greaves, I.C. (1938) Review of An Island Community – Ecological Succession in Hawaii, by Andrew W. Lind, Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. 20, No. 4, Nov. pp. 900–901 Hopkins, A.G. (2018) American Empire: A Global History, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press Kasper, Sherry Davis (2012) Eveline Mabel Burns: The Neglected Contributions of a Social Security Pioneer, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 34, No. 3, Cambridge University Press Rippa, S. Alexander (1958) The Textbook Controversy and the Free Enterprise Campaign, 1940–1941, History of Education Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3, Spring Rutherford, Malcolm (2004) Institutional Economics at Columbia University, History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 31–78, Spring Schwartz, Stuart B. (2005) A Community Within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, Revista des Indias, Vol. LXV, No. 233, pp. 79–116

6

The Colonial Office and LSE

Ida Greaves had a long-standing ambition to research the role of metropolitan monetary systems on colonial dependencies. It is clear from her correspondence with Arnold Plant that she had approached the Colonial Office in London on a number of occasions from the late 1930s onwards, with a view to obtaining a research appointment. Her proposed topic, probably with the support of Arnold Plant, was colonial monetary policy. The Colonial Office in London, founded in 1854, had for decades operated very much as a gentleman’s club in which its permanent officials focused on matters of colonial administration and simultaneously promoted Britain’s expatriate business interests. But when elements of selfrule for the colonies entered into political thinking in the 1930s, there was a need for the British government to be much more mindful of the welfare of colonial people. Policies had to be “informed”, even “impartial”, drawn up with the expert assistance of advisers. Advice was often tendered through committees, one of which was the Colonial Economic Advisory Committee (CEAC) set up in 1943 by Secretary of State Oliver Stanley. CEAC had a short and turbulent life. Its outspoken Secretary was Arthur Lewis, the future Nobel Prize-winning economist. The Economic Research Sub-Committee of CEAC was to be Ida Greaves’ own introduction to the problematic role of the government’s expert advisers. CEAC as constituted comprised a mixture of academics and industrialists. In practice although economists constituted only about one-third of the membership they came to dominate discussions. On CEAC were four professional economists. The two senior economists were Hubert Henderson and Lionel Robbins. Evan Durbin and Arthur Lewis were the two younger academics. Arthur Lewis had been appointed into the Colonial Office in 1941 to research the flow of capital into the colonies, a research post which was in addition to his academic duties as lecturer at the London School of Economics. Subsequently, he was invited by Oliver Stanley to take on the role of Secretary to the new Advisory Committee. DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-6

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Arthur Lewis and Evan Durbin were the young economists regarded by officials at the Colonial Office as being of “leftish views”. Like Lewis, Durbin had been a lecturer at LSE, but by the time he joined CEAC, he was acting as personal assistant to Clement Attlee, the wartime Deputy Premier and Labour party leader. In spite of their lack of seniority, Lewis and Durbin made all the running on CEAC. Neither Robbins nor Henderson attended many meetings. On taking up his appointment as Secretary Arthur Lewis argued that if the Committee was to be “merely an appendage to the [Colonial] Office”, it would be “a waste of resources to use an economist as its Secretary; all it needs then is a competent clerk”. If on the other hand, the CEAC was to make “a real and permanent contribution” by providing “a well thought out body of principles” then this “would be a job into which anyone would be glad to throw his energies”.1 Despite receiving little in the way of encouragement from the permanent officials at the Colonial Office, Lewis and Durbin were determined to push their agenda for reform in colonial policy. CEAC members were to address important issues of colonial policy, regarded hitherto as the prerogative of the Colonial Office. Sub-committees were the places where the proposals of Lewis and Durbin dominated discussions. In his role as Secretary Lewis reminded Sub-committees of the need for economic development “as rapidly as practicable” in the Colonies. On taxation, they should investigate “the share of the proceedings accruing to the Colonial peoples themselves”. Policy must ensure that colonial peoples play their full part in the development of their territories. The government must not offer support to “development systems which relegate them to a subordinate position”.2 These ideas were regarded as radical, even revolutionary in Colonial Office circles at the time, and unsurprisingly Lewis very quickly ran into problems. Those difficulties soon led on to his resignation as Secretary in 1944, whereupon he sent a long and bitter Memorandum to Secretary of State Oliver Stanley in which he described his role as Secretary as “largely a waste of time”, citing fundamental differences between himself and Sidney Caine on the underlying diagnoses of underdevelopment, and what he described as a “touchy and uncooperative atmosphere” within the Colonial Office itself.3 One of the Sub-Committees of CEAC where Lewis ran into problems with officials was the Colonial Economic Research Committee (CERC). While he was still in post Lewis had given his support to a lengthy Memorandum put before this Sub-Committee, a document which had stressed the need for substantial spending on economic research in the colonies. This Memorandum and its accompanying Report first appeared before CERC in 1943. Although Lewis did not refer to her by name, the

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author of these two documents was Ida Greaves. Both documents have the unmistakable imprint of her thinking on colonial policy. She was later (1945) to sign CEAC’s own Report on Colonial Economic Research. It is not possible to put a precise date on when Ida Greaves returned to London from New York to take up her new appointment in the Colonial Office. These were the war years when sea-borne traffic to the UK was hazardous and very little information is available on arrivals at UK ports. However from the dates on the Memorandum and Report which she authored and later signed, it seems that she was in post at the Colonial Office no later than the Spring of 1943. From her correspondence with Arnold Plant (discussed below) it seems that she had contacted the Colonial Office with proposals for carrying out research into colonial monetary arrangements when she was still in New York at Colombia University. She must have received an encouraging response from the Colonial Office, supported no doubt by references from Arnold Plant, to bring about this return to London. Since her research interests concerned dependent colonies, it is not surprising that she found herself on the Colonial Research Sub-Committee and was subsequently responsible for the Memorandum and Report which appeared before it. The Research Sub-Committee had to deal with the fact that funding of economic research in the colonies was not under consideration in the Colonial Office before the 1940s. It had a zero starting point, and had to convince sceptical officials and administrators of the need to undertake economic research in the colonies. In other disciplines such as anthropology, a limited amount of research had been underway for some time. There was also scientific research, principally in relation to primary products, which had benefitted from ad hoc research grants from the 1920s onwards. Research into tropical agriculture was explicitly provided for in the 1929 Colonial Development Fund. Under the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1940 and 1945, the research brief was extended to make significant funds available for research into social conditions in the colonies. Even at this point of time, however, economic research was not included. The Colonial Social Science Research Council which was established in 1944 explicitly restricted itself to projects in the areas of sociology and anthropology. It appears that officials were suspicious of economic research, fearing that it might venture into a number of sensitive issues in colonial policy. This was the background against which Ida Greaves set out a strong case for economic research in her Memorandum and Report. Both were signed by Ida Greaves in her capacity as Secretary.4 It was an attempt to redress the imbalance within social science by putting forward the basis for economic research in the dependent colonies. The Memorandum argued that

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unless Colonial research is carried out at the same level as economic research in this country [the UK], the Sub-Committee will be failing in its essential purpose. The deficiencies in our economic information about the Colonies are the result of their having been dismissed as “primitive” or “simple” and hence unsuited to the same analytical attention as modern economy has received. For practical as well as economic reasons redress of this distortion is overdue. It is important not only that colonial conditions should cease to be the hunting-ground of economic illiterates, but also that they should be subject to the same methods of investigation, elucidation and assessment as have been applied to the more developed economies in whose image their future is being planned. (op. cit. CEAC 45/41, p. 2) Notably Ida Greaves was arguing once again that the tendency to regard Colonies as “simple” or “primitive” was greatly misleading. The research she recommended was many-sided, appropriate to an institutionalist approach. An outline of topics for research had three headings: Descriptive, Historical and Analytical. In “descriptive”, the emphasis in the Memorandum was on standard of living, distribution of income, economic institutions, money, credit and the banking system. “Historical” focused on the history of the various export commodities, the role of indigenous peoples in the exchange economy, import-export firms and labour migration. “Analytical” covered markets and prices, factor productivity, economic incentives, land tenure arrangements and public finance and taxation. It was a comprehensive research agenda, comparable to a syllabus for “development economics” but setting out from a broadly institutionalist perspective. Though headings needed more in the way of explanation and elaboration, economists on the Economic Research Sub-Committee are unlikely to have dissented significantly from its substance. However, there was a lengthy Appendix to the Memorandum, again signed by Ida Greaves, which was more problematic since it called into question the economic competence of two distinguished and influential colonial administrators. The controversy arose because at its first meeting the Colonial Economic Research Sub-Committee had recommended that the appropriate authorities in the Colonies should be asked for their views on the best means of developing economic research in their colonies. In the Appendix to the Memorandum, Ida Greaves stated that replies to this invitation had been received from Sir Charles Lockhart in East Africa, and from Sir Frank Stockdale in the West Indies. Both men were important Colonial Office advisors and administrators and very well-connected in

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their respective spheres. Charles Ramsdale Lockhart was a member of Kenya’s Financial Secretariat, and Chair of the East African Industrial Council. Post-war he would be appointed to the UK’s Overseas Food Corporation. Frank Stockdale was Agricultural Adviser to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and Comptroller for Development and Welfare in the West Indies. He would become Vice-Chairman of the Colonial Development Corporation. Post-war he was appointed to the Chair of the famous Oxbridge Summer Schools which were set up to train Colonial Officers. In short, both men had influence in the Colonial Office and in wider political circles. Both men would have expected their views on economic research to be taken seriously. Sir Charles Lockhart, as reported in Ida Greaves’ Appendix to the Memorandum, had written two letters to the Sub-Committee. In the first letter, he had said that he was opposed to having a separate Economic Department in a Colonial Government to oversee economic matters. He would instead recommend that individual Departments might employ an economist on an ad hoc basis if needed for a particular project. Indeed he said he was not clear what was meant by “economic research”. Collecting data about the economic life of African communities he regarded as a job for anthropologists rather than economists. If investigations on a regional or Empire-wide scale were needed then they should be carried out by “economists of eminence” whose conclusions could not easily be overturned. Ida Greaves clearly took exception to Charles Lockhart’s viewpoint and responded in forthright terms: Sir Charles’ insistence on an “economist of eminence” may reflect the opinion that in economic matters intimidation is the only means of convincing policy-makers and administrators, no matter how ready they are to accept the opinion of mere experts on such subjects as medicine and agriculture … (op. cit., p. 5) The Appendix she submitted to the Sub-Committee goes on to say that in a second letter Sir Charles had referred to the large-scale Government expenditure now being formulated for African colonies. Sir Charles had said there was a need for information on the extent to which the supply of peasant export crops could be increased. This he believed was essential to fund increased expenditure, arguing that estimating the supply of peasant export crops would be a “one man job for an economist experienced in the assembly and the interpretation of facts and capable of sifting facts and opinions … such a survey covering East and West Africa might take a year in Africa, followed by some three to six months in London”.

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To those on the Research Sub-Committee familiar with the scale and diversity of peasant agriculture in East and West Africa, Charles Stockwell’s research proposal with its absurd time frame must have been received with incredulity and Ida Greaves responded in kind: “For an investigation of the scope outlined by Sir Charles, the time is short …” She went on, “It seems doubtful whether sufficient information would be available without considerable preliminary research into for example the amount of labour employed on the land; how it is distributed between different kinds of production; the quantity of subsistence products for which provision should be made … and similar fundamental data”. (op. cit., p. 6) She was prepared to dissent even more strongly from Charles Lockhart’s prediction that the evidence, once collected, would show that little could be expected in the way of increased supply of peasant crops, without drastic changes in the proportion of population to land. This needed to be accompanied, he said, by a radical reorganisation of African agriculture under skilled management, using increased capital in relation to land and labour. “Such a conclusion”, responded Ida Greaves “would mean that the African populations could only be expected to raise their standard of living independently from subsidies from the United Kingdom either by alienating land to immigrant enterprise or by introducing some form of communal farming under Government direction”. (op. cit., p. 6) And she went on to point out that either of these innovations in traditional agriculture would be a departure from the political doctrine of trusteeship. In later years of course it would become abundantly clear to observers that the conflicts inherent in trusteeship were a long-term characteristic of settler economies like Charles Lockhart’s Kenya. Ida Greaves also drew attention in the Appendix to the likely problems for individual economists working, as Charles Lockhart suggested, on an ad hoc basis on projects within Departments. There is not much doubt that the economic expert attached to a particular Department or Board becomes in practice a special pleader for those commodities or activities with which he is connected. That is, he will be the administrative equivalent of the economist representing the business interests of a certain pressure group … if a Territory

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The Colonial Office and LSE acquires a series of such competitive pleaders and propagandists, the grounds for reaching a decision in a matter in which several interests are involved would not be made clear by listening to the experts. (op. cit, p. 9)

It is unlikely that Charles Lockhart welcomed these comments from a newly arrived female economist, probably little known to him. The second respondent fared a little better. He was Frank Stockdale, reporting from the West Indies, who argued in his letter to the Economic Research Sub-Committee that the first requirement was the provision of Economic Surveys for the different colonial economies. He commended to the Sub-Committee Dr Benham’s work. Frederic Benham was a senior colleague of Arthur Lewis at LSE where he occupied the Chair of Commerce. Notwithstanding Frank Stockdale’s recommendation, Arthur Lewis was shortly (1945) to pen a withering critique of Frederic Benham’s Survey of Jamaica, in a Review published in the Manchester Guardian. For the present, however, Frank Stockdale’s views were passed on to the SubCommittee with little positive comment, simply a reminder from Ida Greaves that members of the Sub-Committee had already discussed with Miss Deane (later the distinguished economist and historian Phyllis Deane), her work on the compilation of National Income statistics in the colonies. Ida Greaves suggested that they consult Miss Deane’s handbook on the subject which was shortly to be published by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). When Ida Greaves eventually put before CEAC her signed Report on Colonial Economic Research nothing remained of her outspoken comments in the Appendix to the Memorandum. From this, we may deduce that her comments had not been well received in official circles and had been removed. The Report itself, however, is interesting, because it reflects a distinctive classical and institutionalist approach to research. In particular, its call for greater use of comparative methodology in development policy is a method of enquiry strongly associated with institutionalist economics: the Sub-Committee attaches great importance to the use of the comparative method and is of the opinion that useful results are obtained from comparative studies of a number of problems not only in different Colonial territories, but also between colonies and other countries.5 Comparative study makes extensive use of qualitative and quantitative induction, often with a narrative, to bring “facts” together in an interrelated way. Arthur Lewis himself was open-minded about the inductive

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approach. In the Introduction to his “Theory of Economic Growth” he confessed that every economist goes through a phase where he is dissatisfied with the deductive basis of economic theory and feels sure that a much better insight into economic processes can be obtained by studying the facts of history, The instinct is sound, yet the enthusiasms of this phase seldom survive any serious attempts to get to grips with the facts of history. (op. cit, 1955). Arguably, Lewis’s own attempt to combine inductive and deductive reasoning in the Theory of Economic Growth is one of the least successful features of his book. One can speculate however that Ida Greaves’ reasons for comparative methodology would have had the full support of Lewis. The comparative approach she espoused also prospered in development economics during the 1950s and 1960s, championed by leading developmentalists such as Colin Clark, Simon Kuznets, Albert Hirschman, Gunnar Myrdal and Hollis Chenery. There survives in the Colonial Office Records a letter to Ida Greaves from Austin Robinson in his wartime role at the Board of Trade. He had written a very positive review of her Modern Production among Backward Peoples in the 1930s and was clearly favourably impressed with this Report on Colonial Economic Research. He concluded that her section on Research methods was excellent.6 Notwithstanding his approval, the Colonial Office was clearly unhappy with the Research Sub-Committee. Neither Arthur Lewis nor Ida Greaves were re-appointed to the new Colonial Economic Development Council (CEDC) which replaced CEAC in 1946, though Lewis eventually received an invitation to serve on it in 1948. In the era before “development economics” emerged as a discipline, advisers such as Arthur Lewis and Ida Greaves were being called upon to apply economic concepts to a diversity of colonial economies about which neither the Colonial Office nor the advisers knew very much. Arthur Lewis for one did not underestimate the scale of their ignorance and the limitations of economics in these circumstances. In a spirited defence of “classical” economics he wrote in 1949 that the economics that is relevant to the problems [of developing countries] is not the economics of marginal utility, but the economics of laws, institutions, tenures, nationality, race, region, ideology and kindred determinants of economic equity and the rate of economic progress, which were banished from the economics textbooks and seminars as disreputable topics over 70 years ago.7 In fact many of the economic advisers employed by the Colonial Office in the 1940s had little or no first-hand experience of the colonial economies on which they were

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offering advice. Ida Greaves and Arthur Lewis both of whom were born and raised in the Caribbean were exceptional in this respect. When CEAC was disbanded in 1945 Ida Greaves once again returned to Barbados to live at the home of her father. From there she corresponded with Arnold Plant. The correspondence in question consists of the letters she sent between October 1946 and January 1948 together with some of his replies all of which are available as copies in the LSE Archives. When the correspondence opens in 1946 Ida Greaves is newly arrived in Barbados from Washington. She had arrived by a pioneer air service from New York which made the journey to Trinidad in one day. The first letter to Arnold Plant dated October 22, gives a detailed account of the economic problems of Barbados emerging from World War II, and is wonderfully candid, though in retrospect perhaps unwise, in her outspoken views that colonial policies were exacerbating rather than relieving many of the post-war difficulties: Now that we have been provided in the name of Development and Welfare with a Fisheries Officer and an Agricultural Co-operative Officer we cannot get local fish, and for the first time in living memory we have no sweet potatoes. All poultry and most fruit is sold in the Black Market, largely for hotels, and the recently –decamped Governor went to the dinner parties of the chief buyer. What poor people live on I do not know since the middle class is permanently queued up for the limited imports of saltfish and rice … (op. cit. Oct. 1946) The Governor is not named in the letter, but he would be known to Arnold Plant as Sir Henry Grattan Bushe, recently knighted but then speedily moved to Switzerland for “health reasons”, an explanation for his departure which Ida Greaves found unconvincing. Grattan Bushe was unusual in being appointed as Governor of Barbados six years earlier, directly from the Colonial Office legal staff. Her letter criticizes “his complacent inefficiency [which] has cost the consuming public more than the price of a Liberal earldom” (op. cit.). The letter goes on to criticise strongly the workings of the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts in the West Indies. The Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, beginning in 1929, provided very modest funds from the UK government, initially to finance scientific research in the colonial dependencies. Ida Greaves in her letter to Arnold Plant echoed a widely held criticism of the 1929 Act, that it was not intended to stimulate colonial development as such, but was designed to increase the colonies’ demand for UK exports and thereby help solve the UK unemployment problem. She wrote:

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I have not come across any body of any political or other colour who believes that the D&W movement is intended to benefit colonial peoples. They all regard it as a form of overseas dole for Englishmen. (op. cit. Oct. 1946) She goes on to argue that amendments including the 1940 Act, which increased the amount of CD&W assistance and extended the period for which it was available, had not had any discernible benefits in Barbados. Rather the reverse I think the more intangible and incalculable effects upon local conditions of the parade of expense and inefficiency of the past five years have been distinctly undesirable … The Administrative branch of government enjoys more discredit than before, and the D&W which to their joint annoyance is not distinguished from the Administration by the general public, is regarded with suspicion and no gratitude … (op. cit. 1946) Many of the problems of the war years in the West Indies were associated with the Control Boards which fixed the prices of primary products for export at very low levels. Problems arising out of pricefixing persisted in different forms through the 1950s. There were also significant inefficiencies associated with the import substitution policies also being pursued. Ida Greaves’s letter refers to a soap factory in Barbados: [which was] re-financed under government auspices during the war, and supplied with neighbouring raw materials at half the world market price, which sells inferior soap at a third more than the landed cost of imports – therefore no import licences are issued. (op. cit. Oct. 1946) It would be well into the 1960s before the inefficiencies associated with the management of West Indies in wartime and thereafter, as identified by Ida Greaves in this letter, began to be widely acknowledged by development economists, most notably by Peter Bauer. Ida Greaves also had issues with law and order. Her father had “opened again the old house where he had not been living for the past five years”, and that she was “keeping house with such things as were not looted during that time” (op. cit. Oct. 1946)

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She noted that “the deterioration in public morale is very striking, and I cannot help wondering if that ’law and order’ upon which the Colonial Office has always congratulated itself really exists … ” “Anyway”, she continued, “try to resist Audrey Richards’ desire [Audrey Richards was a highly regarded and distinguished anthropologist working in London for the Colonial Office] to come to the West Indies ‘just to sit’ for two or three years, because in the local view there are already too many people of official status doing just that”. (op. cit. Oct. 1946) A second letter to Arnold Plant from Barbados dated May 29, 1947, tells him that a cable had arrived for her from the UN offering her an appointment as an area specialist in its Division of Non-Self Governing Territories and that she will leave by plane a week later to take up this post: I have no personal contact with anyone in this Division of UN, and I do not know what I am supposed to do when I get there. Either the appointment was supported by one or two friends in Washington who have been getting worried at what they regarded as my prolonged state of idleness, or UN finds it difficult to get staff. But whatever the reason, there is as you know no permanent tenure to UN appointments, so I thought I could try one for a few months without mortgaging my future activities. (op. cit. May 1947) Ida Greaves needed to explain her return to the US to Arnold Plant because she had been in contact once again with the Colonial Office in London with her proposal to undertake research into the impact of the colonial monetary system on colonial dependencies. She was anxious to make clear that she was not abandoning that proposal and that it would be a topic which would absorb her interests for the next decade. She believed that the neglect of monetary policy in the National Plans which were already under discussion in the context of self-government, would jeopardise future development prospects. While waiting for a response from the Colonial Office she had decided to take up the offer from the UN. She wrote: I do not want to give the impression that I have been cheerfully wasting the time of the Committee and the C.O., or that I am dropping the subject of research because something in the lusher land of America has

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turned up … The reason why I do not think that I am abandoning the subject of colonial monetary organisation is that I cannot see plans for economic development, whether under the auspices of UN, D&W, or Mr Taussig, becoming operative without some effect upon the monetary situation in backward territories … Among the numerous ‘balances’ which the Colonies are warned to observe in their 10 Year Plans I have not seen the balance of payments mentioned … If these plans were to be entirely financed by gratuities from the UK this problem would not of course arise, but in fact D&W grants form a minor fraction of the estimated expenditure, so that each colony is proposing to make a considerable increase in the capital imports which it must pay for out of loans and revenue … But if no provision is made for increasing exports … does the Plan have all the elements of success, not to mention consistency? To me, the beginning of the obscurities of the colonial position is whether the C.O. has considered the question of monetary policy, and if so, what decision it reached. And it would surprise me if there’s an answer to that at Lake Success. (op. cit. May 1947) Lake Success on Long Island, where Ida Greaves was heading, was the initial headquarters of the fledgling United Nations in 1946. The location itself was always regarded as a “reluctant host” to the United Nations and the UN decided to move to Manhattan in 1951. From her letter, it seems that Ida Greaves was herself a reluctant appointee to the UN at Lake Success in 1947. She had been hoping to hear from the Colonial Office in London with an offer of a research post, but she was led to understand that the response had been delayed. The final paragraph of her second letter to Arnold Plant reverts to the frustrating everyday problems she encounters in Barbados: “ … local potatoes wither [sic] in the ground while excessive quantities imported with Canadian dollars rot in warehouses. The salt pond in which Barbados Welfare at first forgot to put a bottom is after several years producing a few pounds of salt, and in spite of the subsidised laments over our low standard of living, such US imports as chromium bathroom fittings and plastic handbags are regarded as essential” (op. cit. May 1947) The letter of reply from Arnold Plant (July 1, 1947) apologises for his failure to respond to her first letter to him, a letter in which he says he enjoyed greatly at the time and circulated indiscreetly to various admirers of your correspondence. (op. cit. July 1947)

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With the benefit of hindsight a biographer might wonder whether in fact Arnold Plant’s indiscretion added substance to Ida Greaves’ chequered history at the Colonial Office. Arnold Plant expressed disappointment that the offer of a post in the Colonial Office’s newly constituted Economic Research Committee had not as yet materialised, and voiced doubts about her move to Lake Success, alluding to the hopeless bureaucracy there. I wonder how much good you will have to say about the Division of Non-Self-Governing Territories after you have been there a few months. I have a great friend, Fergus Chalmers-Wright, in the Section of General Social Policy and Standards of Living, in the division of Social Activities, in the Department of Social Affairs, at Lake Success. I am not sure that I have not left out several levels of the hierarchy … (Arnold Plant to Ida Greaves op. cit. July 1947) Predictably, Ida Greaves stayed less than six months with the UN. She left Lake Success in December 1947, and in her third letter to Arnold Plant which was sent from Barbados in January 1948, she wrote: I gather that you had already obtained a good idea of the conditions at Lake Success therefore it probably wont surprise you that I did not succeed in writing while I was still there … “Inefficient outfit” was the term she used to describe the Department of Non-Self-Governing Territories in this letter. No decisions could be reached about the work she was expected to do; whenever she asked about it she was told that the decision would take “a few weeks”. There was a general reluctance within the UN to do anything which might “overlap” with the schemes of another of the international agencies. She wrote to Arnold Plant: … the inspired unanimity of mind of the various International Agencies, which cannot be confused with overlapping as long as they don’t do anything, the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]asked if I’d be interested in going there to do much the same work that ChalmersWright expected to do in the UN. FAO wants to protect backward people from ‘cultural shock’ when it raises their standard of living. I don’t think the problem is very pressing. (op. cit. January 1948) She was astonished to find that the Oxford graduates in “Modern Greats” who were working for the UN in the Department of Non-Self-Governing

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Territories did not know the difference between a territory’s balance of trade and balance of payments. Or that they considered quotations from earlier Reports by Lord Hailey or the Fabian Bureau to be satisfactory responses to serious criticisms of British colonial policy, made by UN delegates from the United States or USSR. She reserved special condemnation for the UK’s labour specialist working in the Department, who promised UN delegates better information next year from the Colonial Reports because “all they’d sent us this year were figures” (op. cit. January 1948). As a biographer one has to wonder whether some of those described by Arnold Plant as admirers of her correspondence welcomed these outspoken criticisms of those they had seconded to the UN from the colonial service. Ida Greaves would have been well aware that Oxford and Cambridge graduates still had privileged access to the highest positions in the Colonial Service. And not unconnected with her problems with Charles Lockhart, would have been the fact that even as late as 1939, 40 out of 56 men in the Kenya Administrative Service were recruited from either Oxford or Cambridge. They were not expected to be familiar with economics, or social science generally. Instead, they were recruited as “gentlemen amateurs” valued as all-rounders and believed to possess unspecified qualities of leadership. But often there was humour in the tailpiece of Ida Greaves’ letters to Arnold Plant. After cataloguing once again the everyday frustrations of her life in Barbados; the lack of essential goods, the inefficiencies of the Control Boards, the fact that the official to whom complaints had to be directed was the son-in-law of the Control Board Chairman, the concluding paragraph of this letter goes on to say: After a drought in what should have been the rainy season, unexpected rains stopped the recent Test Match on the brink of a West Indies victory. An enthusiastic proletarian at the ground announced that it is well known that God is an Englishman. (op. cit. January 1948) The final letter from Arnold Plant to Ida Greaves in Barbados is dated February 9, 1948. He passes on the information about changes in the Colonial Office, particularly the appointment of a new Assistant UnderSecretary of State for Economic Development who would oversee research. It appears to be an appointment which would favour Ida Greaves. Plant writes: I believe he [Gorell Barnes] contemplates a good deal of economic investigation by the Department itself. I am delighted that you are again interested in the Colonial monetary research project … I hope that we

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The Colonial Office and LSE can fix something with you with unusual speed … I hope we shall soon be writing to you from the Colonial Office about the new appointment. (op. cit. February 1948)

Arnold Plant also expresses in this letter his doubts about the new Colonial Development Corporation. His doubts were certainly borne out by the early years of the CDC but it is surprising to read Plant’s outspoken comments at such an early stage in its existence. His reservations centred on the Chairman-designate of the Corporation, Lord Trefgarne. You may have come across the Chairman designate, Lord Trefgarne, during his present visit to the West Indies. I had hoped that the top of the Corporation’s pyramid would have been much higher and more eminent. (op. cit. February 1948) Ida Greaves was also an early critic of the Corporations established in 1947 by the post-war Labour government. Her criticism was specifically directed at the Overseas Food Corporation, established in 1947 with the aim of securing cheaper fats for the UK, as well as promoting development through exports in the colonies. Charles Lockhart, whom she had strongly criticised in the Colonial Research Sub-Committee, was appointed to the Board. In her letter (January 1948) to Arnold Plant, she drew attention to the likely problems of the government’s proposed groundnut scheme which was to be overseen by the Overseas Food Corporation. The OFC was to be responsible for promoting exports of groundnuts (peanuts) from Tanganyika (now Tanzania), taking over a scheme originally set up by the United Africa Company. Ida Greaves in her letter questioned the key assumptions of the Wakefield Report which made great claims for the scheme. She drew attention to the “bald assertion” in the Report that East African groundnuts would save the UK 50 million pounds yearly, pointing out that this would only happen if the anticipated nuts grew and current prices did not fall, which she believed to be unlikely. Again it is interesting to have her comments so early in the life of a heavily promoted government scheme. In the event, the groundnut project was a notable failure as she had predicted. It failed to take into account soil and rainfall conditions, employed unsuitable techniques of production, paid little attention to the social and legal mores of the society in which it was launched, and it was so incompetently managed and audited that instead of the £50 million projected to be saved it was wound up in 1950 with debts of over £35million. The final letter in the correspondence between Arnold Plant and Ida Greaves is dated July 1948. Arnold Plant, (he was now Sir Arnold, having

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been knighted in the New Year) was convalescing from illness and the letter from Ida Greaves was to wish him speedy recovery. It appears from her letter that she had at last received her invitation from the Colonial Office to carry out research into colonial monetary conditions. The Colonial Office is trying to arrange her passage to the UK: They have an eye on a possible troopship at the end of July, but, not being Nancy Cunard, I haven’t. However I hope that when I do come over I find you feeling thoroughly fit again. (Ida Greaves to Arnold Plant op. cit. July 1948) Ida Greaves sailed to Southampton from New York in early August 1948 to take up her longstanding ambition to research colonial monetary conditions. On the face of it, the auspices were good. She had served, albeit briefly at the UN, in the Department of Non-Self Governing Territories. She had been recommended for an appointment in the FAO. In London her mentor, Arnold Plant, as well as holding a Chair at LSE, had served as advisor to the UK government with a place in the Cabinet Office, a role which had earned him a knighthood. In Barbados too she had been able to move in official circles, meeting with key visitors such as Lord Trefgarne, and lunching with the Governor in Bridgetown at Government House. More importantly, she had maintained her strong research interests and now had the offer of a research post in the Colonial Office, initially for one year only, where she could research the influence of the colonial monetary system on the UK’s colonial dependencies. There were, however, problems ahead arising out of her outspoken view on the shortcomings of colonial policy and the role of named individuals. She had already taken issue with Charles Lockhart, later to be appointed to the Board of the Overseas Food Corporation. The anthropologist Audrey Richards, and Frank Stockwell, later to chair the Colonial Office Summer School at Cambridge, were both within her sights. More significantly perhaps her dismissive views on the Colonial Development Corporation and the Overseas Food Corporation would not have impressed Sidney Caine. He was a key advocate of government-sponsored corporations in the colonies, operating along commercial lines. Caine’s ambitions were to come to fruition in 1948 in the establishment of the Colonial Development Corporation. There were other factors which would also prove less promising for Ida Greaves career at the Colonial Office. In the first place she was an economist and economic research still needed to win over converts both in London and out in the field among colonial administrators. She was a female economist, and although there were senior female academics closely allied to the Colonial Office they were from anthropology which

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was regarded more favourably than economics in official circles. Margery Perham served on the Colonial Social Science Research Council which excluded economics; Audrey Richards was another anthropologist, also closely involved in the founding of the Social Science Council. Significantly both had strong Oxbridge connections which Ida Greaves lacked. Audrey Richards had been educated at Newnham College Cambridge, her father was Professor of International Law at Oxford. Margery Perham, a friend and biographer of Lord Lugard, had graduated from St. Hugh’s College in Oxford. In spite of their connections, however, both shared with Ida Greaves the difficulties for women in moving up the academic ladder. Both women had initially been appointed at the lowest grades in the university hierarchy. Audrey Richards eventually became the Smuts Reader in Anthropology at Newnham College, Margery Perham, became Reader in Colonial Administration at Nuffield College, Cambridge. But neither was able to secure promotion to a personal professorship or an established Chair. The parallel situation for Ida Greaves, in obtaining a place on the academic ladder, centred on the London School of Economics (LSE). In June 1948 Lionel Robbins, senior academic at LSE, had written to the Director of the School, Alexander Carr-Saunders, pointing out that there were “gaps in the arrangements” for the teaching of “Colonial Economics” in the coming academic year. The course in question was not part of the undergraduate or postgraduate teaching programme at LSE but was a vocational courses offered over two terms to young cadets and officials in the colonial service. Their fees were paid by the Crown Agents. With much talk in official circles about decolonisation, the course had been re-designed and was close to development economics as it came to be known. Topics included agricultural economics, land tenure, marketing, credit and co-operation, the role of the state in development, secondary industries and imperial preference. The LSE Calendar for 1947 listed the lecturer on Colonial Economics as Dr Lewis, and it may well be that Arthur Lewis had designed the new course. But by the end of 1947, he had already tendered his resignation as Reader at LSE, to take up an appointment to a Chair at the University of Manchester. By his own account, Lewis never lectured in development economics at LSE, so we can assume that though he may have designed the new course he never delivered it. Indeed its low status as a part-time vocational course may have been one of the reasons prompting his departure for Manchester. Moreover, its future was doubtful. The Colonial Economics course, like all LSE’s one-year vocational courses, was destined to disappear in the 1950s, along with the Railway Course, the Exchequer and Audit Course, and virtually all of the LSE provision for evening students. It was a legacy of the many commercial courses which

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had dominated the early history of LSE. The future was believed to lie in full-time undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. During the war years, in the absence of senior colleagues, Lewis had worked tirelessly in providing the core economics lectures to undergraduates both in London and in Cambridge where LSE had been evacuated in 1940. Then in 1945, when senior academic staff returned from wartime service, he found himself side-lined into the less prestigious area of colonial economics, a discipline and area with a very uncertain future at LSE. Though promoted recently to Reader, Lewis had left LSE at the beginning of 1948 and his departure left LSE with a problem. Who could provide the necessary lectures on Colonial Economics? Someone had suggested to Carr-Saunders that Ida Greaves who was shortly to be in post researching at the Colonial Office, might fill the vacancy. Robbins wrote to Carr-Saunders: Might I, therefore, suggest that a letter is drawn up to Miss Greaves to await her arrival at the Colonial Office. What is needed is a course of Applied Economics for Colonial Students of 20 lectures in the Michaelmas and Lent Terms, following, roughly speaking the syllabus set out … in the Calendar. We should also ask her to be prepared to give another two hours a week to the School for classwork and advising duties. (op. cit. Robbins to Carr-Saunders June 18, 1948) On request from Carr Saunders, Robbins supplied the Director with the likely fee for the work. An appropriate fee for lectures, classes and supervisory work during the Michaelmas and Lent Terms would be 260 guineas. Bearing in mind the qualifications and experience of Ida Greaves, one of the School’s most distinguished postgraduates, this remuneration of 260 guineas would seem far from generous. An experienced schoolteacher with first or second-class honours at undergraduate level would have expected a minimum starting salary of £900 to £1000 per annum in 1950s London. If as Scripture says, “the labourer is worthy of his hire”, the outlook for Ida Greaves was not promising, even less so when the senior academic at the Colonial Office, the Under-Secretary of State Sidney Caine, proposed that the honorarium which had already been offered to her by the Colonial Office, should be reduced to take account of the fee being offered by LSE. He wrote to the School’s Director, Carr-Saunders: I assume that Arnold Plant is in agreement with the proposal that she should be employed as you suggest on part-time work for the

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The Colonial Office and LSE School during the next session, since he is, of course, concerned with the research activities on which it is proposed she should be engaged under the Colonial Office. Subject to that we should see no objection in principle, but I think we should have to consider the possibility of some reduction in the honorarium which we had offered her, which was based on the assumption that she would be employed full-time on her research assignment. We would not, of course, propose a reduction which would wipe out the honorarium you have in mind, but would suggest that our proposed payment of £850 should be reduced to £750. (op. cit. Caine to Carr-Saunders June 1948)

Where Ida Greaves’ honorarium finally ended up is uncertain, but the trajectory was certainly downward. A further letter from Carr-Saunders to Sidney Caine on June 29, 1948, reduced the LSE honorarium even further to 250 guineas. He replied to Sidney Caine: Dear Caine I have seen Arnold Plant about the invitation to Dr. Greaves. He is entirely willing that she should be invited, and that being so I propose to offer her an honorarium of 250 guineas for lecturing, class and advisory work at the School next session. Yours sincerely … In the surviving correspondence, it is very difficult to detect any enthusiasm on the part of Carr Saunders at LSE, or of Sidney Caine at the Colonial Office, to appoint Ida Greave to a permanent post. A letter from Carr-Saunders to Arnold Plant indicates that it was from Arnold Plant that the suggestion to employ her had come. Carr-Saunders wrote: … the Colonial Office would only agree [to her lecturing at LSE] provided that you see no objection, since you would be more concerned with her research activities at the Colonial Office than anyone else. I imagine that this is perfectly all right since I fancy that the suggestion of her part-time employment at the School first came from you. (op. cit. Carr-Saunders to Plant June 28, 1948) Arnold Plant had long supported the career of Ida Greaves, in the same way that he supported Arthur Lewis and others of his research students who were fortunate enough to have him as their mentor. But CarrSaunders at LSE and Sidney Caine at the Colonial Office were lukewarm. On the face of it, Ida Greaves now had a superb opportunity both to join a leading academic institution and to carry out significant policy-orientated

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research at the Colonial Office, in the era of decolonisation. This is certainly how she saw the next few years. When she penned a handwritten note of acceptance to LSE on arrival in London on August 17, she was understandably “very glad” to undertake the lecturing required on the Colonial Economics course. In London for a second time, reality was soon to damp her expectations and it seems that her career was never going to take-off at either the Colonial Office or LSE. Confirmation of her poor prospects from the very beginning can be found in the letter Carr-Saunders sent to Sidney Caine in June 1948. Ida Greaves was being invited to LSE because someone was needed at short notice to fill the position left vacant by Arthur Lewis: If there is no objection possibly you might be so good as to go a little further and encourage her to accept? As I have explained, I do not know what we shall do if she cannot step in this emergency. However, the letter goes on to make clear that she will not be considered for the post of Reader vacated by Lewis, or at any other level in the academic hierarchy. She does not fit in. You will remember that you were good enough to give me your opinion about Dr. Greaves as a possible candidate for the Readership in Colonial Economics. We have decided not to attempt to fill the Readership in time for next session. The only likely name before us is that of Dr. Greaves, but we are not quite sure that she will fit and we also understand that you are bringing her back to do a year’s research on behalf of the Colonial Office. In these circumstances we propose to keep the post open and take up the question of filling it during next session. (op. cit. Carr-Saunders to Sidney Caine, June 23, 1948) It can be inferred from this letter that Sidney Caine had not provided a strong reference for Ida Greaves. Had he done so LSE would have been obliged to take her candidature much more seriously. The vacant post at LSE was never filled. Ida Greaves clearly needed to look elsewhere for her next academic appointment. In February 1948 while she was still in Barbados Arnold Plant had written to her saying that there was an opening for an Economic Adviser for the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. He suggested that if she were interested she should contact Professor Shepherd at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad. She may indeed have followed up this suggestion. We know that she travelled from New York to Trinidad in September 1949, primarily in connection with her research on colonial monetary arrangements, but she may have also used the opportunity to explore possible future employment at the College of Agriculture.

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In the month following this visit to the West Indies, she returned to London in October 1949 to resume both her teaching at LSE and her research into colonial monetary systems. LSE was anxious to retain her teaching services on the Colonial Economics course but she had already declined the offer, replying that she would not be able to continue beyond Spring of 1950. One can detect her unwillingness to continue teaching at LSE, which was understandable in the circumstances. There was no chance of promotion to the role which Arthur Lewis had vacated. The research she had undertaken for the Colonial Office was not completed until December 1950. In January 1951, she wrote to Roy Harrod at Christ Church, Oxford, thanking him for accepting her Note on Colonial Sterling Balances for the Economic Journal. Her forwarding address for the proofs was not Trinidad but Barbados. She left London for her father’s home in Barbados on the January 5, 1951. We can now take a step back in time and ask what happened to the Colonial Research Sub-Committee when CEAC was abolished in 1945 and replaced by CEDC, the Colonial Economic Development Council. The answer is that a new CERC was set up. It held its first meeting in May 1947 under the Chairmanship of Arnold Plant. Unlike its predecessor, the CERC was firmly under Colonial Office control. At its first Meeting in the Conference Room at the Colonial Office, Sidney Caine opened the discussion by stating that the new Committee would report directly to the Secretary of State. It was to represent the joint views of the Committee, the Colonial Governments and the Colonial Office. In short the “rebellious spirits” of CEAC had been quashed. Though Arthur Lewis, one of the leading rebels, was appointed to membership of the new Committee (after he had left LSE for the University of Manchester), there is no evidence that he took an active part in its discussions or even attended many meetings. And from the point of view of Ida Greaves, although virtually all the projected research in the Colonial Office was being carried out by senior female academics like her, no women were appointed to the 12-member Committee. The Committee reported that Miss P Ady’s Study of the Occupational Structure of the Gold Coast; Dr C.Leubuscher’s Series of Studies on Colonial Primary Products; Miss P.Deane’s Enquiry into National Income and Dr I Greaves’ Study of Colonial Monetary Systems were underway in the Colonial Office. But not one of these four experienced female academic researchers was appointed to the Committee. Phyllis Deane did serve temporarily as its Secretary, but only until the Colonial Office had established a permanent post, which in the event, predictably, was filled by a man. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Colonial Office was keen to acquaint its administrators serving overseas with new thinking on development policy. Development studies programmes were provided for cadet officers

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at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London. An important innovation was the Summer School, provided alternately by Oxford and Cambridge. Again women academics were in the minority as lecturers and speakers. Typically there would be only one or possibly two female academics, usually anthropologists such as Margery Perham perhaps, or possibly Lucy Mair or Margaret Mead, out of a total of 30 academics. This was the case even when, as in 1948, the Summer School set out to address “the part to be played by women in encouraging initiative in African society”. Even by the standards of the time the conclusions reached by the Working Groups were bleak and backward looking. Quoting directly from the Report the conclusions were that “Education should encourage African women a b c d e f

to perform their present tasks better. to assist their men folk to advance. to develop character and integrity in their children. to encourage their children to progress. to seek to achieve new outlets for their energies. to strengthen their position in society (in certain areas) vis-a-vis men.

And in elaboration of this last point “As African territories move towards either self-government by the African people or to their full share in their inter-racial government, men will need the support of intelligent and socially-gifted wives”8 Ida Greaves career as a policy adviser to government was never likely to prosper from what we know about attitudes to women academics. Added to this she was an economist, a discipline still regarded with suspicion by many in official circles, especially by its administrators and practitioners overseas. Her singular approach to development economics, which drew heavily on the American institutionalist school, gained her only limited respect from other economists. And of course she did not suffer fools gladly, being remarkably, even recklessly, outspoken about the shortcomings of named officials and their policies. The lukewarm response of the establishment to her Report on Colonial Monetary Conditions (1953) for the Economic Research Committee would bring to an end any illusions she may have had for making a contribution to Colonial Office thinking. Notes 1 CO 852/510/30 November 1943.

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2 CO 990/2 CEAC, February 1944. 3 CO 852/586/9 November 1944. The fundamental problems which Lewis identified were related to the underlying diagnosis of underdevelopment and the appropriate role of the government in development policy. For example, Lewis criticised the colonial agricultural departments of the day for concentrating almost exclusively on the technical issues of agricultural science, and neglecting the larger questions of changes in the structure of agrarian societies. He also questioned whether much of the private capital which had flowed into the colonies in the past had maximised the welfare of colonial peoples. 4 CEAC (Research) 45/41 Memorandum on Colonial Economic Research, and CEAC (Research) 46/4 Report on Colonial Economic Research. 5 CEAC (Research) 46/4, para 11. Para 11 begins: “Different Colonial territories vary widely in the size and scope, as well as the form of organisation, of their economies, and it is only on the basis of complete information about the economic system of each territory that its particular problems can be understood and suitable plans formulated for implementing a policy of economic improvement … A worthwhile study of most subjects will certainly include descriptive and historical as well as analytical elements … .” 6 CO 852/578/8. The letter was sent in February 1946 from the Board of Trade at Millbank in response to “Ida Greaves” request for comments on the draft Report. 7 Lewis, W.A. “Developing Colonial Agriculture”, Three Banks Review, No. 2 June (1949). 8 Addresses and Reports of the proceedings at Cambridge Summer School, entitled Factors Necessary to African Progress, University of Cambridge, CDEV, 1948. Such attitudes to the role of women in African Development were behindhand even in the 1950s and to no purpose.

References Cambridge University Archives Archives of the course on Development, Summer Conferences, Cambridge, 1948, 1950 National Archives, Kew, London, contains records of the Colonial Office CO 852/587/8 Colonial Economic Advisory Committee, Research Sub-Committee (August 1944) CO 852/587/5 Organizing Economic Research in the Colonies, Note by W.A. Lewis, August 1944 CO 852/587/8 Colonial Economic Research, Report by the Colonial Economic Advisory Committee (1946) CO 990/19 Colonial Economic Advisory Committee Report on Colonial Economic Research, Economic Research Sub-Committee April 1946 CO 852/587/8 Memorandum on Colonial Economic Research, by Ida Greaves, 1945, includes letter to Ida Greaves from A.B. Fisher Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) February 1946 and letter to Ida Greaves from E.A.G. Robinson, Board of Trade, February 1946 Dimier, Veronique (2006) “Three Universities and the British Elite: A Science of Colonial Administration in the UK”, Public Administration, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 337–366

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Ingham, Barbara (1992) “Shaping Opinion on Development Policy: Economists at the Colonial Office during World War II”, History of Political Economy, Vol. 24, No. 3, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina Leubuscher, Charlotte (1944) Tanganyika Territory, a Study of Economic Policy under Mandate, London, Oxford University Press LSE (London School of Economics) Archives, LSE Library and Special Collections Letters from Ida Greaves to Professor Plant, dated October 22, 1946, May 29, 1947, January 27, 1948, July 5, 1948 Letters from Professor Sir Arnold Plant to Ida Greaves, dated July 1, 1947, January 29, 1948, February 9, 1948, July 14, 1948 Correspondence relating to the appointment of Ida Greaves to replace Arthur Lewis on the Colonial Economics Course at LSE Lionel Robbins from Carr-Saunders, June 9, 1948 Lionel Robbins to Carr-Saunders, June 18, 1948 Carr-Saunders to Sidney Caine, June 23, 1948 Carr-Saunders to Lionel Robbins, June 23, 1948 Arnold Plant from Carr-Saunders, June 29, 1948 Sidney Caine to Carr-Saunders, June 25, 1948 Sidney Caine from Carr-Saunders, June 29, 1948 Ida Greaves from Carr-Saunders, June 30, 1948 Ida Greaves to Carr-Saunders, August 17, 1948 Ida Greaves to Carr-Saunders, May 1949 [Carr-Saunders (Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders) was the Director of the London School of Economics] Petter, Martin (1981) “Sir Sidney Caine and the Colonial Office in the Second World War: A Career in the Making”, Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, pp. 67–86

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The early 1950s effectively marked the beginning of the end of Ida Greaves’ academic career. When she published her Report into Colonial Monetary Conditions in 1953 she was only 46 years of age, a woman with the highest academic credentials and a pioneer in the emerging discipline of development economics. But following that Report, in the years leading up to decolonisation, her writing on colonial monetary arrangements attracted widespread criticisms from opponents of currency boards. Though she was resolute in defending her corner, and was always ready to acknowledge the costs as well as the benefits of colonial monetary arrangements, the experience did nothing to advance her career either within the colonial office or elsewhere and on a personal level it must have been at the very least hugely discouraging. It is not possible to say with any certainty at what point Ida Greaves’ interest in the colonial monetary system arose. Documents show that she was fully conversant with the economics and accounting implications of colonial currency arrangements, and of banking practice and monetary policy, from early on in her career. At Radcliffe College in the early 1930s she had scored an A grade in her chosen postgraduate course of Money and Banking, no mean achievement in the subject and among such a distinguished cohort of scholars. It was not until 1948 that at last she received the invitation she had been seeking, to undertake research into the colonial monetary system. Her correspondence with Arnold Plant indicates that she had approached the Colonial Office on a number of occasions in the late 1930s with the aim of securing a research appointment. When the invitation came about in 1948 it was through the newly established Colonial Economic Research Committee. The research area she proposed to cover was already highly controversial, setting the Colonial Office at odds with the Treasury and Bank of England, and provoking disputes even within the Colonial Office itself. Whether Ida Greaves was aware of the pitfalls awaiting her as she DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-7

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embarked on this research topic it is impossible to say for certain, but her colleague Arthur Lewis was already in no doubt. A Note sent by Arthur Lewis to Sidney Caine in 1944 had begun “I promised you a note on topics which the CEAC Sub-Committees might investigate … ” Lewis went on to list the topics for investigation under four headings: Marketing, Primary Production, Communications and Finance. The last of these, the work of the Finance Sub-Committee, was problematic. Finance involved colonial currency and government investment spending. These were the two topics which were described by Lewis as “delicate semi-political issues”. The Colonial Office recognised that the two issues were linked theoretically. In fact Sidney Caine had already asked for guidance on this point in a closely argued letter, five pages long, which he had sent to Keynes at The Bank of England in May 1943.1 Put at its simplest Caine was asking whether the reserves which colonial countries had earned from exports, and which were held in London as sterling balances, could and should be made available to them for investment in development projects. Caine’s opening paragraphs reminded Keynes of the “almost universal form of colonial currency organisation”. Local currencies were issued on demand against deposits of sterling in London. How did a colony accumulate sterling? For a colony which was a significant exporter of primary products – for example cocoa from the Gold Coast, or sugar from the West Indies – a positive sterling balance would be the outcome of a surplus on the balance of trade, that is export earnings exceeded spending on imports. During the 1940s and 1950s, most colonies had an export surplus and sterling balances – held, as Caine pointed out in his letter to Keynes – either in a liquid form as a cash deposit in London, or invested in British government securities. Interest from the deposits or investments was credited to the revenue of the colonial government. The question Sidney Caine was posing in this letter to Keynes had two parts: i The issue of local currency was in the hands of the Crown Agents in London. They tended to follow a very conservative policy, holding reserves equal to 110% of currency in circulation, before making the investment income available to colonial governments. Was this highly conservative approach appropriate, he asked? ii The reserves were held in British government securities, and colonial governments could use the income from these securities, for development purposes. Would it, Caine asked, “be better to simplify the

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business by using the currency funds directly for the kind of expenditure which might otherwise be financed from [open market] loans?” (letter to Keynes op. cit.) Caine was seeking guidance from Keynes and the Bank of England, on issues relating to colonial monetary arrangements, topics which were clearly under discussion within the Colonial Office and more widely in the Finance Sub-Committee of CEAC. Although Sidney Caine approached Keynes for guidance on this matter, he was confident enough to make his own views known. … I confess that my present feeling is that I can see no great advantage in a change to the current practice. The underlying factor which, I think, makes the situation of Colonial currency entirely different from those of the fully independent countries is that they are an integral part of a very much wider system. Colonial borrowing, for instance, is only to be a very minor extent dependent on the internal resources of the Colony. Their pool of capital is that provided by the general United Kingdom monetary and financial system … I have always been inclined to hold that, owing to the close currency connection and complete absence of any independent banking system, the average Colony is, for monetary purposes, in a position hardly at all different from that of, say, the County of Cornwall … (op. cit.) How did Keynes respond to this letter? At one level he accepted Caine’s opinion, with a reply which was brief and to the point.2 The analysis set forth in your letter of May 14 is complete and convincing. I have no criticisms. It provides a sufficient basis for judgement. Nevertheless, Keynes expressed reservations. The present set-up is designed, probably on purpose, to promote a high degree of conservatism in development. A colony will be more reluctant to develop if it thinks it has to borrow than if it thinks that it is using its own money … Now it may be that too much conservatism has prevailed hitherto in Colonial finance. (op. cit.) With hindsight, it is tempting to conclude that Keynes rather than Sidney Caine was on the right side of history.

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Colonial monetary arrangements were subsequently under discussion in the Finance Sub-Committee of CEAC. It was one of the more active Sub Committees, recording seven meetings before it was disbanded. It had a high profile, being chaired by Sir Bernard Bordillon, Governor of Nigeria. A prominent member was the banker, Sir William Goodenough, shortly to become Chairman of Barclays. There was a senior accountant, Sir Harold Howitt, and a representative of the Crown Agents to deal with currency questions. The high status of the Finance Sub-Committee was also reflected in the presence of Treasury and Bank of England officers as observers. No other Sub-Committee had such status. Additionally, there were two very senior economists appointed to the Finance Sub Committee as members, Arnold Plant and Lionel Robbins. The Secretary to the sub-committee was Ida Greaves, indicative of her high status at this stage in her career in the Colonial Office. In 1945 a Memorandum, “Questions of Policy in Management of Colonial Currencies” was put to the Finance Sub-Committee.3 Although it was not signed by her, there is little doubt that it was the work of Ida Greaves, in her capacity as Secretary. Many of the principles and much of the information in the Memorandum were to re-emerge later in her Report on Colonial Monetary Conditions. The Memorandum begins with an account of the financial system of the Colonies, described as largely primitive and dependent. The stage of primitiveness of course varies very widely. Palestine and Hong Kong at the one extreme are as sophisticated in money matters as a Western European country, but in most of Africa “money” means actual cash and generally notes rather than coins, banking transactions are confined to a limited circle and specialised financial institutions [ such as markets for Treasury Bills, or organised Stock Exchanges]are unknown … As to dependence … the currency systems are almost entirely dependent directly or indirectly on sterling; and the same is true of their banking systems. The banks operating in the Colonial Empire are generally branches of banks registered in London or in other important financial centres. (op. cit.) The Memorandum went on to explain that the banks which operated in the Colonies looked to London for the investment of their surplus funds. They also looked to London for any additional investment funds which they required. Moreover the relationship between banking and currency in the Colonies was different from that in the UK. Currency for circulation in

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the Colonies was issued to colonial banks as and when they needed it, (for example for payments to producers at harvest time), on demand and against their reserves. Reserves themselves were held in London, either on deposit or invested in gilt-edged securities. The sterling could not be reinvested back in the Colony. Consequently there was no scope for monetary management as in a developed country such as the UK through the activities of the central bank and intermediary financial institutions. In the Colony, it was the decisions of the commercial banks themselves which determined how much currency was issued to depositors and the number and size of loans. The Memorandum listed a number of criticisms of this system and a number of questions of policy to be answered, though like Caine’s letter it took pains to reach no firm conclusions. Essentially the discussion in the Memorandum centred around the proposition that the system had a strong deflationary bias; that it was inelastic and incapable of adjustment to local conditions; the practice of holding 100% reserves in deposits or gilt-edged securities deprived the Colonies of funds which could be made available for development; and rates of commission on the issue and redemption of currency were too high. Given the influence of the Treasury and the Bank of England, and the presence on the Sub-committee of Barclays and the Crown Agents (who managed the Currency Boards in London) it is not surprising that the Memorandum was not well received. H. E. Young, the observer from the Treasury, drew up a detailed and lengthy rebuttal.4 The bias … of the present system is not deflationary but antiinflationary, which is quite a different thing. It makes it more difficult for an unregulated expansion to occur, and since there is no Central Bank or other adequate authority to regulate the money system, some such automatic system of regulation is probably necessary … The 100% sterling reserve ensures that local currency at all times has full external purchasing power … if the principle of a fiduciary issue is accepted in certain cases there are obvious dangers that pressure may be applied for a greater margin of fiduciary issue than we should think wise … [a managed system] presupposes the existence of a developed banking system and the means to ensure conscious control of the banks’ cash and lending policy. A control of this sort can only be exercised efficiently by a central expert authority: in practice by a Central Bank working in close co-operation and harmony with the Treasury. It is clear that the Colonies have neither the mechanism not the personnel to run such a system. (H.E. Young, op. cit.)

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With questions being raised about shortcomings in Colonial monetary arrangements, the Bank of England increasingly felt it necessary to defend its position. Officials in the Bank of England and Crown Agents took strong exception to the proposed publication of a Chapter in a book edited by Margery Perham at Nuffield College, Oxford, which criticised the colonial monetary arrangements as they applied to Nigeria. The controversial Chapter on Finance was the work of an Austrian-born economist, John Mars (Hans Materschlager) who argued that Nigerian development was being held back by the reserves locked up in the Currency Board, that the monetary arrangements had a deflationary bias, and that Nigeria was disadvantaged by the absence of a Central Bank and a discretionary monetary policy. Anticipating problems Sidney Caine sent a copy of the proposed Chapter in Margery Perham’s book to RN Kershaw at the Bank.5 The response Caine received from Kershaw was to the point: I do not take as charitable a view of this production as you appear to do … it is so permeated with errors, and by misjudgements based on those errors, that I should hesitate to say what value should be put on the whole work … What is one to think about a work which shows so little knowledge of ordinary banking and market facts and currency practices and draws such sweeping conclusions from unsound premises. I am in fact terrified by this bland application of theory undisciplined by facts. We are told in another section that Nigeria ought to have a Central Bank which ought to engage on open market operations! I should be sorry to think that this work is typical of Nuffield College productions – thinking that is to say of their future reputation. Nor can I understand why it should be considered appropriate that a subject as remote and specialised as Nigerian finance should be treated by a Continental Economist who clearly is at sea in many elementary financial matters.6 From the debates which were taking place at the time, correspondence between Sidney Caine and Maynard Keynes, the exchanges in the Finance Sub-Committee of CEAC, and the response of the Bank of England and Crown Agents, it is fair to assume that by this stage in her career at the Colonial Office Ida Greaves must have been aware that her proposed research into colonial monetary arrangements would be leading her into difficult and sensitive territory. The colonial currency system was attracting a great deal of controversy at the highest levels in the financial establishment. From the very beginning, there was sensitivity as to how her research findings might be received in official circles at home and

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abroad. Surprisingly, for someone with her qualifications and experience, she was asked to appear before a Supervisory Committee to explain and justify the proposed research. The Supervisory Committee was high-powered, comprising the Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, William Gorell Barnes, plus Sir Bernard Bourdillon, Richard Sayers Professor of Banking at the London School of Economics and WN Kershaw, the same who had responded so vehemently to John Mars’ work on Nigeria. The Note which the Supervisory Committee made prior to the interview with Dr Greaves makes clear that it had misgivings concerning her proposed research.7 First, there was an overall concern about the publication of the Report. Mr Kershaw and Professor Sayers expressed some anxiety about the ultimate publication of the final results of Dr Greaves’ research, e.g. whether it would appear that it had been sponsored by the Supervisory Committee. (op. cit.) They were reassured by the Colonial Office representative that the ultimate decision on publication would rest with the Secretary of State and when the Report was published in 1953 a compromise seemed to have been reached. Though the preamble to the Report acknowledged that it had been sponsored by the Colonial Economic Research Committee, it went on to say that “the views expressed in it are those of the Author and not of any Government authority”. No one, other than Ida Greaves herself, was responsible for the findings. The Committee had a second source of worry which was minuted by them in the Note. It seems that Ida Greaves was reluctant to commit to a final Chapter in her proposed outline, in which she would draw conclusions for public policy. Bearing in mind the controversies surrounding the topic, this was no doubt a wise move on her part, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions. The Supervisory Committee was not satisfied with this approach and made its views known. It was unanimous that some indication, if not of conclusions, at least of important deductions of substance for the better informing of public opinion, was most necessary. The Committee then went on to suggest unashamedly the lines along which they expected her conclusions to be developed. On central banking for example:

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its relevance to local colonial conditions is also for consideration, though in that event it would be essential to explain prominently the difficulties and obstacles in the way of development of central banking and the extremely limited scope which such an institution in any of the Colonies could enjoy. In such contexts there should be an exposition of such important shortcomings as the absence of local capital markets which would make the hasty establishment of a central bank dangerous. And on the colonial currency boards: Changes in the rate of exchange between a Colonial currency and sterling were not regarded as impossible under the sterling exchange system. But such changes, if made otherwise than in very special circumstances, could easily undermine that confidence in Colonial currencies which derived from the sterling exchange system, and it would be unwise to consider them except very much as a last resort. We do not know how Ida Greaves responded to the views of the Supervisory Committee, on the expected policy implications of her work. Obviously, she was aware that this was a highly sensitive research project, with the lines of battle drawn up well in advance. The Note says that the views of the Committee on her expected conclusions were subsequently discussed with Dr Greaves. Her reported reply was “that much of this was what she had in mind”, and there we must leave it. Certainly, she had been astute enough in her response not to commit precisely to policy conclusions one way or another. Bearing in mind the independence she had always demonstrated hitherto in her dealings with the Colonial Office and others, it is fair to assume that she embarked on the research project with an open mind. The research project was funded by a grant from the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, and lasted for two years from September 1948 to the end of 1950. The Colonial Office was keen to have a comparative element incorporated into the project, and this resulted in two periods of fieldwork, the first in the West Indies and the second in West Africa. For the West Indies, Ida Greaves visited Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados in September and October 1949; For West Africa (Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Nigeria), she visited in April and May 1950. She produced interim Reports on her fieldwork, which were submitted to the Supervisory Committee. Her Report on the West African fieldwork, dated 1950, is available in the Colonial Office records and as we will see contains much of interest. Unfortunately, the parallel Report on the earlier fieldwork in the West Indies has not survived. It is clear from the records that she did produce a

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Report on her time in the West Indies because there is a Note in response to it, from the Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, Gorell Barnes. Essentially his response was very complimentary, recommending that more work could be done on an important problem which she had identified, viz. the claim from the commercial banks operating in the West Indies, that they could not identify sufficient “suitable” borrowers in the Colonies, and were therefore in a highly liquid state. Additionally, she was asked “merely as a point for discussion” whether and how her conclusions applied to the many smaller territories in the West Indies, especially those with few Europeans in their populations.8 Ida Greaves’ West African fieldwork was the subject of her second interim Report in 1950. Titled Enquiries into Monetary Conditions and Commercial Banking Practices in Sierra Leone, The Gold Coast and Nigeria it is available in the records.9 What strikes the reader is that it had an extraordinarily demanding itinerary. She sailed from Liverpool on April 6, 1950, and arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone on April 15. Although the Colonial Office had advised the local Secretariat in Freetown of her arrival, the telegrams had been kept secret and her visit, as she later reported, was a “complete surprise”. There was no suitable accommodation in Freetown so she was quickly passed on to Accra, Gold Coast, where she arrived on April 21. She left Accra for Kumasi, arriving there on May 1, then travelled to Takoradi on May 5, and Accra on May 10. From there she travelled to Lagos (Nigeria) arriving on May 15, and to Kano on May 27. She left Nigeria for London on June 1. She travelled alone, with no research assistance or official arrangements to smooth the way. Her itinerary was determined by the availability of accommodation and transport, both as she reported, “a matter of prolonged difficulty”, and in her customary forthright manner she strongly criticised these conditions; beginning with Elder Dempster, [UK Shipping Line] such matters as transportation and housing in West Africa are awful … From my experience on the ground and in the air, the subsidised bone-shaker business operated by BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation] in that part of the world is not only a monopoly, but would be a public scandal in a place where public opinion is sensitive to such matters. Indeed it is curious how the technical services which represent the fruits of modern progress contrive to make the most of Africa’s tradition of backwardness. (op. cit.) A thought-provoking consideration is that just one year later, in 1951, Sir Cecil Trevor made an official visit to the Gold Coast for two months at the

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invitation of the Gold Coast Government. He had a more limited goal than Ida Greaves. He was concerned only with the Gold Coast, where he was to explore the possibility of a National Bank, constituted on commercial lines, to finance development projects. By way of contrast to Ida Greaves, his Report was able to record his gratitude and appreciation for the excellent hospitality and facilities he was offered by the colonial administration in the Gold Coast. His visit was “pleasurable and interesting, the arrangements made for my tours in the country [enabled] me to meet the different interests and communities and greatly facilitated my pleasant task”. Whereas Ida Greaves travelled alone in West Africa under difficult circumstances, Sir Cecil Trevor moved in some style, accompanied by a senior representative of the Bank of England, whom, he recorded “worked with me during my enquiries preliminary to visiting the Gold Coast, accompanied me throughout the tour, and has taken part in preparing the material for this report”. Clearly, his was a very different experience.10 Ida Greaves’ Interim Report on her fieldwork in West Africa, contained many insights which were to inform her later (1953) Report on Colonial Monetary Condition. It also anticipated her controversial papers on the Colonial Sterling Balances, which are better known to scholars and attract interest to the present day. The Report shows that from the very beginning of her travels to West Africa, she was surprised by the “free and resourceful currency markets flourishing in Las Palmas and Kano”. (Las Palmas in Grand Canaria would have been a port of call on her voyage from Liverpool to Freetown.) She called into question the common assumption that indigenous money markets were primitive and dysfunctional. “Evidently if you want to sell goods to intransit or cosmopolitan customers nowadays, you must be an international money-changer as well as a trader, and the people who think the customary West Indies relations of pounds/shillings and dollars/cents difficult should study the complications of United Kingdom and B.W.A. [British West African] currency, French and C.F.A.O. francs, South African notes and coins, and of course American dollars, upon which Hausa traders in Kano and Indian merchants or Portuguese dealers in Las Palmas gladly embark. I was told that Indian merchants in Las Palmas willingly accept cheques from West African residents known to them. Presumably the cheques are sent to a branch of the same business in the territory on which they are drawn” (op. cit.). The fieldwork also strengthened her belief that monetary policy and development planning needed to take into account social as well as economic realities, those “adamant social and economic foundations in West Africa to which current policy must either conform or fail” (op.cit.). However, she goes on to say, her fieldwork

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Colonial Monetary Conditions has not altered in any essential the opinions on the nature and characteristics of the colonial monetary system which I already held. In fact, it confirms my previous views and conclusions, namely that the banks are overseas branches of London head offices and that the supply of currency as well as the control of credit are based on their central accounts in London; that the working of the currency system is closely related to the banking position since, subject to the Currency Boards’ commission, head offices regard colonial and London cash as interchangeable; that for foreign exchange purposes the Colonies are part of the United Kingdom balance of payments – and conversely that the exchange rate of local currency is not based on the territory’s trade, which is a point which attracts no attention locally; and that for capital purposes they are an integral part of the London money market. To put it another way, neither the external purchasing power of the colonial currency nor the credit of the Colonial Government depends upon internal conditions. They both derive from the monetary policy being pursued in Whitehall. (op.cit.)

This is a confident account of the workings of the colonial monetary system, one which was closely identified with Ida Greaves and would feature strongly in the currency board debates of the nineteen fifties and sixties. Ida Greaves did not at this stage draw any policy conclusions from her observations and analysis in West Africa. In her view it was a matter of speculation as to how well a self-governing territory would perform in the future in attracting private business capital, if its economy were to be fully exposed to international exchange rate risks, and if investors lacked confidence in the emerging political environment (op. cit., p.3). However, there was a thread of criticism to her fieldwork which related to the behaviour of the two commercial banks in West Africa, Barclays and the British Bank of West Africa. Her criticisms centred on the high charges both banks levied for their services on customers in West Africa, together with the secrecy surrounding Barclay’s West African activities, a policy which Barclays justified on the grounds of business advantage. We can now turn to the full Report, Colonial Monetary Conditions, published by the Colonial Office in 1953, and described as No. 10 in its Colonial Research Studies Series. The author was Ida Greaves, PhD (Econ), and as the author stated in her preliminary note, the views expressed were hers alone, and not those of any Government authority. In the event it proved to be a highly controversial document, attracting attention from many quarters over the years, including criticisms from some highly placed academics. There was also an unpleasant undertone to some of the criticisms implying that Ida Greaves was an apologist for

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colonialism, which she certainly was not. Few of the critics appear to have had any idea of who she was, her Caribbean background, career in Canada, the UK and the US, or her strong academic and policy-making credentials as adviser in the Colonial Office or at the UN. Indeed even in 2021, in a research paper on the currency board debates of the 1950s in which she is acknowledged to have taken a leading role, she is simply described as a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and not even accorded the honour of her PhD in economics.11 The 1953 Report begins with an account of the long-run historical relationship between the UK and its colonies, arguing that the monetary system “can be properly understood only in the light of experience and growth”. The currency board system was a comparatively recent development in colonial monetary affairs. “while the currency authorities in various colonies have issued the types and denominations which local customs required, every colonial currency is really sterling in a different place from the United Kingdom … colonial currencies may be regarded as territorial token money based on London sterling, into and out of which they are automatically transferable on demand. It follows that the terms and concepts which were evolved to deal with the relationship of different currencies to gold, or of independent currencies to each other, such as par value and foreign rate of exchange, are not directly applicable … ” (op. cit.). The Report went on to acknowledge that the sterling assets in the hands of most currency boards were well in excess of the value of the currency issue needed. Currency authorities were not permitted to hold reserves in the stocks of their own colonial governments, but instead were obliged to invest in sterling securities, including those of other colonial governments. These were recorded statistically as part of the official UK “sterling balances” belonging to colonial territories. It followed from this that no colonial government could have an independent monetary policy. … in contrast with modern theories of public finance and managed money techniques, the basis of the colonial monetary system is the inability of a Colonial Government to influence the supply of money directly and to control the level of prices, of employment or anything else by monetary policy. Indeed a Colonial Government is not in a position to have a monetary policy. It lacks both banking and budgetary facilities for such a purpose. (op. cit.) The possible deflationary bias of the currency board system could have been compensated to some degree by commercial banks in the colonies extending credit as there were no legal requirements concerning reserves

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which they had to hold against credit. However, as the Report noted (op. cit.), the branches of colonial banks were highly integrated with their head offices through capital control and interlocking directorships. And as in the UK, the “creditworthiness” of customers was the primary concern of the colonial branches. Given this, the restricted range of security for loans in colonial economic conditions tended to reduce the availability of credit. The final Chapter of the 1953 Report set out its conclusions. At the beginning of her research project, the Supervisory Committee had asked Ida Greaves for a policy-oriented chapter, but the Chapter as it turned out did not provide the unqualified support for the colonial monetary system that the bankers on the Committee had clearly expected. But neither did the conclusion offer a blanket condemnation of colonial monetary arrangements, as others might have hoped. Indeed, bearing in mind the controversies which later surrounded the Report, it is surprising how moderate and evenly balanced its conclusions appear to the modern reader. The Conclusion re-stated the view that external relations for colonial territories should not be regarded as “foreign” since the only foreign transactions were those external to the London sterling system, carried out as part of the UK foreign exchange accounts. It was conceded though not explored further, that complaints from colonies about restrictions on dollar purchases “raises an issue of magnitude and complexity” (op. cit.) and that more could be done to enable colonial governments to draw down part of the sterling balance to make new internal investments. It goes on to say, however, that the amount of capital which could be released in this way differed widely between territories and if an independent central bank were to be established in a territory, “it might be desirable to preserve large currency funds in order to provide the new bank with capital and reserves for its own operations”. It goes on to say that there is little doubt that “if a colonial territory undertakes the operation of an independent monetary system, it will have to hold through whatever institution is established for the purpose, larger reserves than are required for for a dependent currency alone” (op. cit.). In line with criticisms she had made in her interim Report, Ida Greaves drew attention in the concluding chapter of the main Report, to the high charges incurred in the colonies by customers of colonial banking services. Her recommendation was that this element in the system should be recognised and abolished “with an understanding that some reduction in charges should then be effected for the general public” (op. cit.). The ending paragraph of the Report is typical of Ida Greaves’ pragmatic and prescient approach: In all the history of monetary movements there is no evidence that an independent currency provides a country with an automatic remedy for

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its poverty, and no indication that there is a magic formula, such as creating internal cover for its currency issue, which alone will raise it to more prosperous heights. For a small country, indeed, the successful management of its own currency may prove to be one of the more difficult responsibilities of independence. (op. cit.) Notes 1 T 236/4253 letter to Keynes at the Bank of England from Sidney Caine, May 14, 1943. 2 T 236/4253 Letter from Keynes to Sidney Caine at the Colonial Office, May 18, 1943. 3 T 236/4253 Colonial Economic Advisory Committee, Questions of Policy in the Management of Colonial Currencies CEAC (Finance) 1945. 4 T 236/4253 Questions of Policy in Management of Colonial Currencies, Comments on Memorandum for Finance Sub-Committee of Colonial Economic Advisory Committee, May 7, 1945. 5 OU 68/1 Letter from Sidney Caine to RN Kershaw at the Bank of England September 1943. 6 OU 68/1 Letter from RN Kershaw, Bank of England, to Sidney Caine, Colonial Office September 1943. Sidney Caine felt obliged to pass on this response from the Bank of England, to Margery Perham at Nuffield. He used what he described as “somewhat modified language” to convey the sentiment of Kershaw’s response. 7 CO 852/1081/4 Note of a meeting of the Supervisory Committee to Examine Dr Ida Greaves’ Proposed Outline of her study on Colonial Monetary Conditions. 8 C0 852/1081/3 Confidential Note to Dr Greaves, copied to Professor Sayers, from Gorell Barnes February 13, 1950. 9 CO 852/1081/4 Interim Report on West African fieldwork by Ida Greaves July 1950. 10 Gold Coast, Report by Sir Cecil Trevor on Banking Conditions in the Gold Coast and on the Question of Setting up a National Bank, Government Printing Department, Accra, Gold Coast, 1951. 11 Thakkar, Parth “The Currency Board Debate of the 1940s–1960s”, Studies in Applied Economics, Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, October 2021.

References Gold Coast (1951) Report by Sir Cecil Trevor on Banking Conditions in the Gold Coast and on the Question of Setting Up a National Bank, Government Printing Department, Accra, Gold Coast Greaves, Ida (1953) Colonial Monetary Conditions, Colonial Office, Colonial Research Studies No. 10, HMSO Hopkins, A.G. (1970) “The Creation of a Colonial Monetary System: The Origins of the West African Currency Board”, African Historical Studies, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 101–132

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Krozewski, Gerold (1993) “Sterling, the ‘minor’ territories and the end of formal empire 1939–1958”, Economic History Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, pp. 239–265 National Archives, Kew, London. Records of the Colonial Office CO 852, CO 984 West African Currency Board CO 1025 Finance Department T236 Overseas Finance Division T220 Imperial and Foreign Division Newlyn, W.T. & Rowan Oxford: Clarendon Press, D.C. (1954) Money and Banking in British Colonial Africa: A Study of the Monetary and Banking Systems of Eight British African Territories United Africa Company (1951) “The African Currency Board” Statistical and Economic Review, No. 8, September

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Why did Ida Greaves’ views on the colonial monetary system attract such a strong negative response from economists at the time? In her published papers and reports she stressed the benefits to the colonies which she believed arose out of their monetary arrangements. This was not a popular viewpoint in the era of decolonisation notwithstanding the fact that she presented a carefully argued case, and was always willing to acknowledge that there were costs as well as benefits to the system. On the cost side, she highlighted the high administrative costs of the currency boards. On the benefit side, she stressed the contribution which currency boards could make to the stabilisation of export earnings and national income. Under the currency board system dependencies would be discouraged from going down the road of credit expansion and deficit financing and would thus be protected from inflation and rising export prices arising out of domestic sources. Again on the positive side, she argued that colonies had no need to devote resources to managing the money supply or exchange rate, though admittedly they were required to bear a high proportion of the administrative costs of the currency boards. Finally, foreign investors could be assured of the security of investment, thus relieving those colonies which could attract financial flows from abroad from the need to maintain a surplus on trade, in order that money supply could expand in line with output. If the commercial banks were active in lending in the colony – though Ida Greaves herself was doubtful on this point for West Africa – there was no need for the currency board system to have a deflationary bias. Despite the care with which she developed her analysis, her views on the colonial monetary system were dismissed out of hand by very many influential academics. The problem seemed to be that the papers which Ida Greaves produced in the 1950s on the colonial monetary system tended to emphasise the technical arrangements appropriate to currency boards. But as Keynes recognised in his exchange with Sidney Caine, there is much more to banking than technical issues. In Britain’s case, the currency boards of the 1940s and 1950s were central to the operation of the United Kingdom’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003393825-8

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sterling area, a manifestly unfair monetary system given the fixed exchange rate regimes of that time.1 Ida Greaves, however, was determined to demonstrate that currency boards in Britain’s dependent colonies were technically neutral, and indeed could be of advantage to small colonies with underdeveloped monetary and financial systems. Given the discriminatory realities of the sterling area, and in the era of decolonisation, undoubtedly she was caught on the wrong side of history and came off a loser in the debates. True to character, when attacked by fellow academics she responded robustly, and in kind. As a recent writer on currency boards has wryly remarked, “where there was Ida Greaves there was a debate”.2 The starting point was her Note “The Sterling Balances of Colonial Territories” which she submitted to the Economic Journal, a leading academic journal, in 1950. It had been accepted for publication by Roy Harrod, the distinguished Oxford economist, just before she left the Colonial Office for Barbados in January 1951. In the Note in the Economic Journal, Ida Greaves denied that the reserves of the currency boards were sterling loans to the British government. They were not “locked up” as critics such as John Mars had claimed.3 Rather they but were held as interest bearing assets in the colonies’ reserve portfolios.4 Moreover in the calculation of the liabilities and assets of colonial territories, she argued that account should also be taken of additional investment funds provided for colonial territories by the United Kingdom under the various Development and Welfare Acts. These were assets that could be counted in addition to the sterling assets in the reserve portfolio. Her 1951 Note provoked a strongly worded response from a senior Oxford economist Arthur Hazlewood (“Sterling Balances and the Colonial Currency System,” Economic Journal, December 1952). “Dr. Greaves exposition fails to reveal the real burden, in the form of foregone imports, which the existing currency system imposes on the Colonies” (op. cit.). In fairness, Hazlewood made clear that he was not attempting to assess the general merits or demerits of the currency board system, but was focusing only on the problem of foregone imports. Ida Greaves did not take criticism lightly, and drew up another strong rebuttal in the form of a second Note, “Sterling Balances and the Colonial Currency System: A Comment” submitted to the Economic Journal in 1953, again accepted by Roy Harrod. It was published in November of that year. By this date she was in the United States, first in Chicago and then in Arlington, Virginia. “Mr Hazlewood’s note” it ran, “which refers to an earlier note of mine … is mainly concerned to prove that [my] exposition fails to reveal the real burden, in the form of foregone imports, which the existing

Towards a Conclusion 105 currency system imposes on the Colonies … This failure was not mere negligence. I do not think there is such a burden, and it is curious that Mr Hazlewood should have derived one from the sources of information he cites”. (op. cit.) She goes on to say that there is nothing in the currency system to prevent export producers in a colony spending their income on imported goods if they want to do so. Except for the statutory excess of 10% retained by the authorities, the currency funds were matched in full by currency in the possession of owners somewhere in the colonies. However earned, these incomes could be spent on anything that was for sale in the territory, whether a domestic product, or a sterling or a foreign exchange import. Hazelwood’s arguments she described as “palpably absurd as well as being contrary to experience” (op. cit.). The debates about the merits and costs of the currency boards rolled on through the 1950s, and contrary to Ida Greaves’ strongly held opinions, the majority of academics took a negative view of the colonial monetary system. There were some exceptions, a notable one being Frank H.H. King in his study of the system as it operated in Singapore and Hong Kong. In the Preface to his Money in British East Asia (1956), he alluded to the many attacks being made by academics on the colonial monetary system, referencing the articles and their rebuttals in the Economic Journal and elsewhere. He noted that sympathetic writers like Ida Greaves had been unable to satisfy their critics. His conclusion was that the attacks on the system, at least as it applied to his experience in British East Asia, were unjustified. But he counselled against making generalities from the experiences of different colonies. British West Africa should not be treated as if it were East Asia. East Asia, he pointed out, already had a high degree of monetisation and well-functioning domestic banking institutions. Like all colonies, it was expected that it would grow through time. As it grew its requirements for money (liquidity) would grow. Under the colonial monetary system increased supplies of money could not be secured via domestic policy. The necessary supplies could only be secured by the colony enjoying a surplus on foreign trade (on the current account) or an inflow of investment finance (on the capital account). He argued that colonies like Hong Kong and Singapore were not dependent on a trade surplus for liquidity. They could rely on the capital account, attracting private finance from abroad because their economies were well developed financially, with extensive banking networks willing to arrange loans. By way of contrast in West Africa, financial institutions were poorly developed, and in the absence of a trade surplus, businesses would be dependent on the branches of the

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British commercial banks to increase liquidity. And as Ida Greaves herself conceded, in West Africa those institutions were highly conservative in their lending policies. The debates in the literature on the colonial currency boards ceased abruptly in the 1960s as newly independent colonial territories began to acquire their own central banks, thus transforming their monetary systems overnight. In defending the currency boards so stridently in the 1950s, Ida Greaves could be said to have backed the losing side. Was she nevertheless substantially correct in her defence of the currency board system? This is a complex technical question and it does not lend itself to an easy answer. The appendix “The Currency Board Mechanism and the Sterling Area” provides a resume of the technical issues, illustrated by Figure A.1. Summarising the criticisms she faced in the early 50s, they centred on the supposed costs of holding reserves and the growing consensus among development-minded economists that the sterling assets which could have been used for development purposes instead were being “locked up” in reserves. In principle, as she demonstrated their complaint had little justification. The currency boards existed to fulfil a banking function, and not to provide long-term development finance. If the system had been working as intended, reserves should have been channelled, as she claimed, into productive investment via holdings of colonial stock. Figure A.1 shows how and where financial capital was supposed to move within the currency board system. But critics justifiably question whether Ida Greaves paid sufficient attention to the realities of the system, how it worked in practice, and whether it performed as competitive theory suggests, in directing capital into the most productive uses. Where did the capital go? Which colonies and sectors benefitted? What was the status of colonial stock? How was it rated? To what extent was it influenced by the activities of the Crown Agents and others who masterminded the system? How competitive was the system? Without answers to questions such as these, it is difficult to say just how effective the currency board mechanism was in directing funds into the best uses, including of course those projects favoured by development economists as improving the quality of life in dependent colonies.5 Given her background in political economy, and her shrewd appraisal of social and political realities, it is surprising that though she willingly acknowledged the potential costs of the colonial monetary system, particularly its high administrative costs, she did not address directly the wider political and psychological implications of a dependent monetary system. The official mindset in the era of decolonisation, was hostile to handing over financial control to the dependent colonies. The financial portfolio was generally the last to be relinquished, and even then with great reluctance. There was a disturbing undercurrent of racism in

Towards a Conclusion 107 financial matters. One Treasury nominee for a highest ranking financial appointment in West Africa failed because of his wife’s “pronounced antipathy to Africans”, and “her distaste for dining with Africans”. She refused to use the local library “because the books were handled and used by Africans”.6 The official mindset was manifested in the membership of the Colonial Currency Boards. At an early date (1945), the exclusive composition of the boards had raised concerns at high levels, leading to a meeting between the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, Sidney Caine and others from the Colonial Office to discuss the issue. The Governor questioned the practice of appointing only UK Crown Agents and Colonial Office civil servants to the currency boards. Was there not a case for appointing some local people with local knowledge and experience? The answer from the Colonial Office was no, since the problem of selection of such a person would present great difficulties … There were political difficulties in the case of Palestine (Jews and Arabs). Further there was the possibility of a demand in an area like West Africa that a native should be appointed whether or not he measured up to the required standards … The Boards were largely concerned with technical machinery – investment of funds and provision of currency. It was not clear therefore how anybody representing local opinion would add to the usefulness and efficiency of the Boards.7 Disregarded and discounted, it is unsurprising that many of Britain’s colonial territories faced with these attitudes, arrived at independence with a feeling of powerless and inferiority. Currency boards in theory were technical devices which had a banking function. These were the features which Ida Greaves quite rightly stressed. But currency boards operated within the reality of the post-war sterling area and after 1945, sterling was a fragile currency, in a persistently weak position as an international reserve. Liberation of the colonies’ sterling balances by newly independent central banks would have placed sterling under severe strain. Though transactions within the sterling area were free of restrictions, those with the rest of the world, particularly dollar transactions, were restricted to prevent the drawing down of the sterling balances. To encourage compliance, the Bank of England, Treasury and Colonial Office maintained that sterling area policies were mutually beneficial to Britain and its members. The presumption of mutuality masked a significant degree of exploitation of the dependent colonies, who were major contributors to the sterling balances. It is clear from those documents which were confidential at the time, that officials themselves found it increasingly difficult to justify colonial monetary arrangements to colonial

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governments who understandably were increasingly sceptical about their own lack of independence in monetary matters. Ambitious politicians in the dependent colonies, as well as authorities in the United States, and the majority of development economists, were of the opinion that none of the major decisions of sterling area policy reflected a genuine agreement between equals. All members of the club were not equal, and the value of sterling was essentially a purely UK affair. Ida Greaves was not an apologist for colonialism as some of her later critics appear to assume. Her singular approach to the colonial monetary system derived from her attachment to the classical theory of trade. The monetary system as she saw it was part of the network of relationships supporting “plantation economies”, the dominant form of development in tropical regions in which control resided at the metropolitan centre. Dating back to her doctoral thesis of the 1930s, her pioneering study of dependency in a plantation economy, she pointed out that even in West African territories where crops for export were produced by indigenous smallholders, they were purchased and shipped by external trading firms with substantial capital at their disposal. The monetary system at any point of time, therefore, was a straightforward reflection of the fact that the dependent colony had its financial centre in the United Kingdom. This was the case whether it was slavery or independence, capitalism or imperialism, mercantilism or free trade, the gold standard or tariffs, internal controls and inconvertible sterling. The American institutionalist perspective still had many adherents in the 1950s. The sterling area in the 1950s in no sense fulfilled what a founding member of institutionalism, JR Commons, regarded as necessary conditions for reasonable transactions, namely, equal opportunities; fair competition; and equality of bargaining power. So given her attachment to institutional economics it is difficult to understand why Ida Greaves would defend the Sterling Area so robustly. Kenneth M. Wright of the Federal Reserve Bank (New York) drew attention to the damaging post-war restrictions placed on dollar imports into the dependent colonies, in order to bolster the value of sterling. Ida Greaves took him to task in the Comment she submitted for publication in 1954, arguing that colonies “had some discretion as to the actual goods that were admitted or excluded … the total dollar expenditures of each colony as well as the particular goods imported depended in some degree upon the case the local authorities presented in London …”.8 Echoing the earlier debates in the Economic Journal, Kenneth Wright followed up his initial complaint with a Reply to Ida Greaves’ Comment, which was published alongside her Comment in the American Economic Review. Wright pointed out that “Miss Greaves” (sic) had made an assertion which said little about how far colonial autonomy went in

Towards a Conclusion 109 practice. In reality, he said, “available statistics reveal that colonial dollar imports did not in fact keep pace with those of other members of the sterling pool during the greater part of the post-war period”. Wright was undoubtedly correct. The burden of restrictions on dollar imports fell disproportionately on dependent colonies. UK dollar imports were virtually constant between 1948 (when dollar restrictions were tightened after the sterling convertibility crisis), and 1952. Other sterling area countries like Australia which were Dominions and not dependent colonies, actually increased their dollar imports between 1948 and 1952. The picture for the dependent colonies was very different. Because of restrictions their dollar imports declined significantly, by at least one-third, between 1948 and 1952. The Treasury and the Bank of England were well aware of the differential impact of import quotas against dollar and other non-sterling goods. A (secret) report from a joint working party into problems of the sterling area, circulated in June 1956, concluded that The widespread use in the area of discriminatory trade restrictions against dollar, and sometimes against all non-sterling imports has been a significant feature in the war and post-war years. This policy has of course been pursued with very varying degrees of rigidity by the different members of the area … If, however, compliance with these rules were to be regarded as a test of membership, it must be admitted that not all would pass or would have passed at any date in the postwar period which one might choose …9 Why did Ida Greaves defend the sterling area so robustly when it was manifestly so discriminatory? The answer lies in a paper she published late in her career, in 1954, “The Character of British Colonial Trade” in The Journal of Political Economy, a leading economics journal. At this point in her career, she had taken up a research appointment at the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica.10 The paper restated her long-held belief in the applicability of the classical trade theory of J.S. Mill. Mill described the West Indies as “the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities … the trade … more resembles the traffic between town and country, and is amenable to the principles of the home trade”.11 Ida Greaves had a long standing attachment to the explanatory value of classical trade theory, as she said, Whatever political and strategic reasons there may be for being under the British flag, from the standpoint of trade the colonial territories are essentially specialized producing parts of a widespread economy which

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has its financial, industrial and managerial center in the United Kingdom … one of the principles of Mill’s time which remains unchanged … While colonial investment and production are largely an overseas extension of the metropolitan system, colonial money is entirely a similar extension of the English monetary system. (op. cit. 1954 pp. 3, 10) It is interesting to Note that Sidney Caine in his correspondence with Keynes in 1943 had argued that there was “no great advantage” to the colonies in any proposed changes in monetary arrangements. The colonies had the advantage argued Caine, of being able through the currency board system to draw on the pool of capital provided by the UK monetary and fiscal system, and “owing to the close currency connection, and the complete absence of any independent banking system, the average colony is, for monetary purpose, in a position hardly at all different from the County of Cornwall”. This is an interpretation of classical trade theory so close to that Ida Greaves, that one wonders if she had suggested it to him. Describing the “average colony” as no different from Cornwall in monetary matters was unlikely to persuade the detractors of the currency board system. And it is surprising that Ida Greaves herself did not subject the institutions which underpinned and supported the colonial monetary system to her customary incisive political scrutiny. In the course of time, the currency debate went against Ida Greaves as independent central banks in developing countries replaced most currency boards. The debates on the merits and drawbacks of currency boards did however re-emerge in the 1990s. The new focus was on the role such boards might play in weak states, by bringing currency stability to failing economies operating within the global system of flexible exchange rates.12 Debates in the 1990s and later followed on from important contributions by Anna Schwartz, John Williamson, and Steve H. Hanke researching a new role for currency boards in developing countries. The outcome has been that the controversies stirred up by Ida Greaves and others in the 1940s and 1950s have not been consigned to a historical footnote. Rather they are now part of an important and wider question, namely, whether the economics profession as a whole pays attention to the need to incorporate finance and banking into economic theory. Ida Greaves was a pioneer in this respect, and was able to put her undoubted talents in monetary theory, to good use. But she was unable to draw on a fully articulated institutional theory of money in which the behaviour of the colonial governments, banking and business interests, and others were the key drivers of the colonial monetary system. The colonial monetary system remained for Ida Greaves an essential feature of the plantation system, and it is here that her significant

Towards a Conclusion 111 contribution to development economics was located. One of the leading exponents of underdevelopment and dependency in plantation economies was the Caribbean economist George Beckford. He acknowledged in his classic 1972 book, Persistent Poverty, the pioneering contribution of Ida Greaves, and included her alongside many distinguished writers in the Caribbean radical tradition, such as Eric Williams and Lloyd Best, which he referred to as the “Plantation School”. In his preface to Persistent Poverty, Beckford characterised the Plantation School by its adherence to the belief that underdevelopment derives from the institutional environment, not just its external relations, but also the internal pattern of economic, social and political organisation. The external dimension of a plantation economy, its export orientation and foreign ownership, is where Ida Greaves focused in her later papers. This is an aspect of her work which Beckford acknowledged and appreciated. Though internal institutional factors had been fundamental to Ida Greaves’ early work, they were not given due prominence in her later papers, particularly in what was her final published article, “Plantations in World Economy” (1958).13 The paper is of some significance because it was so poorly received by the audience when she presented it in the late 1950s at a seminar in San Juan, Puerto Rico, held under the auspices of the Pan American Union. The seminar was headed “Plantation Systems of the New World”, and it brought together a distinguished gathering of social scientists to discuss the future of plantation economies. Ida Greaves, whose academic affiliation was given as the University of Chicago, presented the opening paper. From the outset she made clear that she proposed to set aside the wide political and historical debates surrounding the plantation system – its role in mercantilism versus free trade, slavery and independence, capitalism and imperialism. Instead, she told her audience, she would concentrate on the plantation system as a business organisation, with distinctive business objectives and methods. “Historically and economically” she argued, “the plantation system is fundamentally international in character. Wherever it is found it derives from external stimulus and enterprise; it has always depended on external markets; and it is still largely involved in external finance” (Greaves, 1958, p. 76 in Revista Geeografica). In support of this proposition Ida Greaves invoked classical economics, particularly J.S. Mill’s claim that the West Indies was a place “where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities and that the trade between them [is] similar to the town and country trade at home” (J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book 3, Chapter 25). For the first time, she referred to sugar cane production in the West Indies as having been brought to the islands by Jewish producers in north-east Brazil, who had migrated to

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Brazil when the Dutch had taken over the region from Portuguese colonists. Sugar cane then had quickly outstripped the first crops planted by the British and French colonists in the West Indies, namely and cotton. Historically plantations were essentially global institutions. Even where they had been supplanted by local ownership, the system’s connections with external markets and external finance remained. Ida Greaves made a distinction between external political control and external “ownership”. Even where independence had brought an end to political control from the metropolitan centre, plantations frequently remained dependent on the centre for trading arrangements (tariffs, quotas, etc.), finance and technological resources. The puzzle is why her approach to plantations as a business model attracted such disapproval from the audience in San Juan. There is an account of its reception by a relative of one of the academics present describing an interesting aspect of the conference as the position taken by Ida Greaves, formerly of the London School of Economics. Ida Greaves was described as someone who had many of the prejudices of the white Barbadian. The response of the audience was described as tolerant bemusement on the part of the bulk of those attending, none of whom were sympathetic to the colonial mentality she espoused. One explanation might be that the conference participants were mainly sociologists and social anthropologists, whose tolerance of economists may have been limited. Possibly they expected rather more discussion of the historical and political aspects of plantations, those features which Ida Greaves had deliberately set aside. More importantly perhaps, her paper also addressed the likely future prospects of plantations, and she was prepared to argue that there was a future for plantations, against the general sentiment of the audience. Her arguments in favour of plantations were carefully crafted, looking at three possible alternatives to commercial plantations, namely peasant co-operatives, publicly-owned corporations, or government-controlled marketing boards. She looked at the three “business models” as they had operated to date in the tropics, and suggested that all three had serious limitations in practice. Co-operatives had not superseded plantations by offering lower costs or better quality. The more successful co-operatives required government assistance. Of publicly-owned corporations, she had little that was positive to say. The United Kingdom’s Overseas Food Corporation, and Colonial Development Corporation, had made huge financial losses, embarking on grandiose projects like the Tanganyika groundnut scheme, with imperfect local knowledge and inadequate preparation. Nor did the widespread adoption of marketing boards for primary products spell success for tropical exporters. Marketing boards frequently came to be favoured as institutions for levying export taxes, as a means of bolstering government revenues.

Towards a Conclusion 113 It is interesting to Note that her 1957 conference paper was one of the first occasions on which the important 1956 work by Polly Hill, on the indigenous Gold Coast farmers, was brought to the attention of a wider audience. Ghana’s native cocoa farmers held land under a variety of local tenures. These farmers, enterprising and resilient lost out significantly from the price-fixing strategies of the cocoa marketing board established by the colonial government during the Second World War.14 There is little doubt that according to those present Ida Greaves’ contribution to the 1957 conference was met with incomprehension and dismay. Even a Review in the Geographical Journal of the whole range of thirteen conference papers, singled out her contribution for especial criticism as being “tendentious”, expressly promoting a controversial point of view.15 She had explicitly restricted her analysis of the plantation to “their economic character and the part they have played in world trade” (1958, pp. 76). In so doing it appears that she had lost completely the sympathy of her audience in Puerto Rico, which had expected something rather different and more radical from the opening speaker. Nevertheless, to dismiss her contribution as the prejudices of a white Barbadian, was unjust and demeaning to the totality of her work and experience. Notes 1 See appendix for a resume of the literature on the sterling balances. 2 Parth Thakkar (2021) “The Currency Board Debate of the 1940s – 1960s”, Studies in Applied Economics, John Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, October, p. 20. 3 John Mars (1948) “The Monetary and Banking System in Nigeria”, in Mining Commerce and Finance in Nigeria, edited by Margery Perham, London: Faber and Faber. 4 Refer to Figure A.1. Ida Greaves was correct in identifying the transfer of sterling from the currency board in London into reserves in the form of interest bearing assets. 5 One feature of the colonial monetary system which Ida Greaves did not appreciate was the degree of collusion between Barclays and the Bank of British West Africa. There was extensive pricefixing on services, and collusion on lending policies. See Gareth Austin and Chibuike Ugochukwui-Uche, (2007) “Collusion and Competition in Colonial Economies: Banking in British West Africa, 1916 – 1960”. Business History Review. 6 CO 1025/117 (1957). Correspondence relating to the appointment of a Central Bank Adviser and Governor – Designate in Nigeria. 7 CO 91/202 (April 1945). Letter from Secretary of State Oliver Staley to Montagu Norman, giving reasons for Colonial Office’s unwillingness to broaden representation on the Colonial Currency Boards. 8 Ida Greaves, “Dollar Pooling in the Sterling Area: Comment”, The American Economic Review, pp. 655–658. 9 T 236/5362. Problems of the Sterling Area, Report by a Working Party of the Treasury and the Bank of England, June 1956 Para. 6(4).

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10 Ida Greaves (1954) “The Character of British Colonial Trade”, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. LXII, No. 1, February. 11 AS quoted by Ida Greaves, J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book 3, Chap. 25, in the Ashley Edition. 12 An update Thakkar, Parth (2021) on the state of play in the currency board debate draws attention to more recent arguments in favour of currency boards, as bringing currency stability to turmoil-ridden states. Authors cited in favour of currency boards are Anna Schwartz (1993), Steve H. Hanke (2002) and Malcolm L. Treadgold (2005). 13 Ida Greaves, (1957) “The Plantation in World Economy”, in Plantation Systems of the New World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Social Science Monographs VII, Washington DC, for the Pan American Union. Later published in Revista Geografica (1958). 14 Ida Greaves quoted “the latest summary of the introduction and establishment of the cocoa crop in the Gold Coast, namely The Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, A Preliminary Survey, by Polly Hill, 1956”. It is likely that Ida Greaves had occasion to speak to Polly Hill about her work on the Gold Coast when both were in Cambridge in the early 1950s. Polly Hill, niece of Keynes, was always Cambridge based. 15 C.T. Smith (1958) “Review of Plantation Systems of the New World”, in Geographical Journal, Vol. 127, No. 3, p. 365.

References Greaves, Ida (1951) “The Sterling Balances of the Colonial Territories”, Economic Journal, Vol. 61, No. 242, June, pp. 433–439 Greaves, Ida (1953) “Sterling Balances and the Colonial Currency Systems: A Comment”, Economic Journal, Vol. 63, No. 252, December, pp. 921–923 Greaves, Ida (1954) “The Character of British Colonial Trade”, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. LXII, No. 1, February, pp. 1–11 Greaves, Ida (1955) “Dollar Pooling in the Sterling Area: Comment”, The American Economic Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 655–658 Greaves, Ida (1957) “Colonial Trade and Payments”, Economica: New Series, Vol. 24, No. 93, February, pp. 47–58 Greaves, Ida (1958) “The ‘Plantation’ in World Economy” in Plantation Systems of the New World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar Held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Social Science Monographs VII, Washington DC, Pan American Union, made available in Revista Geografica by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History Hanke, Steve H. (2002) “Currency Boards”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, No. 579, January, pp. 87–104 Hazlewood, Arthur (1952) “Sterling Balances and the Colonial Currency System”, Economic Journal, Vol. 62, No. 248, December, pp. 942–945 Schwartz, Anna J. (1993) “Currency Boards Their Past, Present, and Possible Future Role”, Carnegie-Rochester Series on Public Policy, Vol. 39, December, pp. 147–188 Smith, C.T. (1958) “Review of Plantation Systems of the New World”, Geographical Journal, Vol. 127, No. 3, p. 365

Towards a Conclusion 115 Thakkar, Parth (2021) “The Currency Board Debate of the 1940s – 1960s”, Studies in Applied Economics, Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics Treadgold, Malcolm (2005) “Colonial Currency Boards: The Seigniorage Issue”, History of Economics Review, No. 41, pp. 126–141 Williams, John H. (1929) “The Theory of Trade Reconsidered”, The Economic Journal, Vol. 39, No. 154, June, pp. 195–209 Williamson, John (1995) “What Role for Currency Boards?”, Institute for International Economics, Washing DC Wright, Kenneth M. (1955) “Dollar Pooling in the Sterling Area: Reply”, The American Economic Review, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 658–661

Postscript Ida Greaves: A Pioneer Development Economist?

In 2006, I was fortunate to be able to spend two afternoons, in February and in September of that year, in conversation with the distinguished economic historian Professor Phyllis Deane (1918–2012). Then 88, she was living at the time in Gretton Court, a residence for the elderly, mostly academics, in Cambridge. She had retired from her post as Professor of Economic History at Cambridge in 1983, but continued to be an active researcher. When I spoke to her in 2006, she had recently published her biography of John Neville Keynes, the economist and father of John Maynard Keynes. Phyllis Deane was the only individual I have met in the course of these researches, who knew and worked with Ida Greaves and could offer some personal recollections of her. I had written to Phyllis Deane explaining that I would like to talk to her about her early career as an economist in the 1940s when she was employed as a young researcher by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and later by the Colonial Office. She had worked alongside the leading economists of the day, Austin Robinson, Richard Stone, James Meade, Alec Cairncross and later Arthur Lewis. At the NIESR she had drawn up national income accounts for colonial dependencies, publishing path-breaking estimates for Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Jamaica.1 She co-authored with Julian Huxley an issue of Target for Tomorrow, titled “The Future of the Colonies”.2 In the Colonial Office, she served for a short period as Secretary of the Colonial Economic Development Council (CEDC) established in 1946. In this capacity, she had initiated an important enquiry into the problem of rural indebtedness among small-scale peasant farmers.3 So her own credentials as one of the early development economists were never in doubt. When I expressed an interest in learning more about her contemporaries, the female social scientists who were similarly connected with the Colonial Office in the 1940s and 1950s, she was very sympathetic and supportive. I had four names in mind, Marjorie Perham, Audrey Richards, Rita Hinden and Ida Greaves. Phyllis Deane added others.

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The meetings were not formal interviews. There were no set questions, and certainly no recording equipment. But I learned a great deal in conversation with Phyllis Deane about the women social scientists who inspired and influenced her. The American anthropologist Elizabeth Colson (1917–2016), still a close friend, was in touch with Phyllis Deane in 2006. They had worked together in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) when Phyllis Deane was carrying out her fieldwork for the NIESR research. Elizabeth Colson had lived in Zambia for many years though in 2006 she was in danger of losing her right to stay there because of her public position on social and ethical issues. The historian and specialist on African development Marjorie Perham was described by Phyllis Deane as very powerful and well-connected in Colonial Office circles. At one point she had offered a post to Phyllis Deane at Oxford, which she had declined. Rita Hinden was South African, she founded the Fabian Colonial Bureau in London and was a close colleague of the Labour Party politician Arthur Creech-Jones who entered the Colonial Office in 1945 after the defeat of the Conservatives in the post-war general election.4 Phyllis Deane spoke warmly of Rita Hinden whom she said she met on many occasions, though she made it clear that she did not share Rita Hinden’s left wing political philosophy. None of the three women we discussed, Elizabeth Colson, Marjorie Perham and Rita Hinden, was an economists by training or inclination. Nevertheless they were fully engaged in debates about decolonisation. Phyllis Deane herself had studied economics in her first year at University of Glasgow. In conversation, she indicated that she had gone on to specialise in economic history rather than economics under the influence of Alec Cairncross, an inspiring teacher she said, who was influenced by Keynes. She had become increasingly uncomfortable with economics, which had become too abstract and mathematical. Phyllis Deane had first encountered Ida Greaves when aged 23, Phyllis was employed as a research officer at the NIESR in post between 1941 and 1945. Her role involved estimating colonial national incomes. This work of hers was known to Ida Greaves and commended in a report submitted to the CEAC Research Sub-Committee by Ida Greaves in 1945. Phyllis Deane knew at this point that she had been nominated as successor to Ida Greaves, becoming temporary Secretary of the Colonial Economic Development Council (CEDC). However, she was unaware that Ida Greaves was shortly to return to Barbados. Indeed, Phyllis Deane was surprised to learn from me at our first meeting that Ida Greaves was born in Barbados, and she was destined in 1945 for Bridgetown, where her father lived. Ida Greaves was described to me by Phyllis Deane as “very much the English lady”, a description that has stayed with me coming, as it did, from the only person I have met who was personally acquainted with Ida Greaves.

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In 1950, Phyllis Deane left the Colonial Office for Cambridge University, where she lectured in applied economics. Her promotions at Cambridge came late in her career, and related to her research in economic history rather than economics. She was not appointed to a Chair in economic history until 1981, two years before she retired. She remembered meeting up again with Ida Greaves at Cambridge in the mid-1950s, when Phyllis Deane was an assistant lecturer in economics. Ida Greaves, who was ten years her senior, was employed as an occasional lecturer in economics. Phyllis Deane had seen her book Modern Production among Backward People, but had not read it. She understood that it related to labour in poor, agricultural societies. She was most surprised to learn of Ida Greaves’ background at McGill, which led to her path-breaking study of the black migrants into Canada. Ida Greaves she said, was always a very helpful colleague, but on reflection she seemed to be “very isolated”, and “belonged to no circles” (sic). There is a hint in these brief recollections of Phyllis Deane, that Ida Greaves was a very private person, revealing little in the way of personal information in everyday conversations with colleagues. It is a puzzle, for example, that Phyllis Deane never discovered her colleague’s West Indian background. As Phyllis Deane ruefully remarked, she had no idea where Ida Greaves travelled or what she did when she got there! On the face of it, the two Cambridge-based economists had much in common. They had first-hand experience of the relevant councils and committees advising on colonial policy. They were familiar with the recommendations made by advisers on development policy in the transition to independence. Both had expertise in the specific areas relating to development policy in the transition to independence, namely, the control of export prices for selected tropical products through marketing boards, and rural credit and indebtedness in the dependent empire. Both had periods of fieldwork in tropical Africa and the Caribbean to back up their policy recommendations. There is a strong case for concluding that both were “pioneer” development economists. The term “pioneer” was first used to describe the development economists of the 1940s and 1950s, following the retrospective collection of essays edited by Gerald Meier and Dudley Seers for the World Bank, Pioneers in Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 1984. The distinguishing feature of a development economist is one who personally engaged with development over a long period, and willing to work within a wide variety of social, political and cultural environments. The development economist probably acts as a policy adviser to governments and international agencies, having lived and worked in developing countries. The full list of “pioneer development economists”, in the Meier and Seers’ book, included Peter Bauer, Colin Clark, Albert Hirschman, Arthur Lewis,

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Gunnar Myrdal, Raul Prebisch, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Walter Rostow, Hans Singer and Jan Tinbergen. The reader will not be surprised to learn than no women economists were counted among the “pioneers”. One of the British “pioneers”, listed by Meier and Seers, was Peter Bauer. As a young researcher during the early 1940s Peter Bauer had been invited by the Colonial Office to research rubber smallholdings in Malaya. His report, when it appeared, was strongly critical of the regulation scheme that controlled the price of rubber exports from colonial Malaya. He then went on to West Africa, where he was similarly critical of the arrangements for stabilising the prices of export commodities, such as cocoa, groundnuts, palm kernels, palm oil and cotton. Products were sold through marketing boards at prices well below world prices. The surpluses which accumulated were effectively tax revenue. Peter Bauer’s criticisms of what he called the “State Export monopolies” were unpopular in the Colonial Office at the time, and continued to attract disapproval from academics and policy-makers for many years.5 Gerald Lawson, Assistant Undersecretary at the Colonial Office, justified the policy of marketing boards in a Memorandum in 1941.6 He argued that the small indigenous farmers “received more money than they knew what to do with; much of it was wasted; exaggerated ideas of the value of their products and numerous expensive tastes were acquired”. Bauer argued, on the contrary, that a system introduced to bring price stabilisation had resulted in the large-scale confiscation of producers’ incomes. The marketing boards prevented the rise of a prosperous peasantry and concentrated power in the hands of government. In conversation with Phyllis Deane, I was fascinated to learn that she and Ida Greaves both championed Peter Bauer’s work within the Colonial Office. In her paper on plantations delivered in Puerto Rico, Ida Greaves had strongly criticised the price-fixing arrangements of government-inspired marketing boards in colonial dependencies. Phyllis Deane confirmed that both she and Ida Greaves had supported Bauer’s pro-market stance when the issue had arisen in the various Colonial Office committees. Looking at development from a pro-market standpoint made neither Ida Greaves nor Phyllis Deane apologists for colonialism. No school of thought in early development economics, whether of the left or of the right, had a monopoly of concerns about negative impact of colonial policy on the dependent empire, though as scholars and practitioners the pioneers differed as to the way forward. The paper which Ida Greaves delivered in Puerto Rica in 1957 effectively marked the end of her career. In that paper she had criticised two of the pillars of Britain’s post-war colonial policy, the marketing boards and the public corporations, namely the Overseas Food Corporation and the Colonial Development Corporation. Whether the negative reception of that paper was a factor in

1922

Malvern Girls College

ENGLAND

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Enrols at McGill University Teaching at Iowa State College

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Report on Colonial Monetary System published by HMSO

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UNITED STATES Barnard College

Fellowship at Radcliffe

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Bryn Mawr College and London School of Economics

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Masters Degree “The Negro in Canada”

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Figure P.1 Timeline of Ida Greaves’s Career.

1907

Born in St. Michael Parish

BARBADOS

Ida Greaves’ Career

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her apparent withdrawal from academic life in the 1960s is speculation. The paper on Plantations in the World Economy was effectively her final contribution in terms of scholarly output. There were a number of reviews of books and articles which she submitted to journals in the 1960s and 1970s. They are listed in the references to this Postscript. A favourite destination for her reviews was the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, with four reviews between 1959 and 1978. The American Academy of Political Science (AAPS) was an institution which chimed in with her life-long attachment to social science, broadly defined. Founded in 1889 with the bi-monthly publication of its journal, the AAPS aimed to work across the social science disciplines, and encourage research into major social issues.7 Open to women from its earliest days, it was prepared to discuss in its annual meetings, controversial issues such as race relations. It had a longstanding connection with Bryn Mawr College which again may have some relevance, given the time which Ida Greaves spent at the university in the United States. Her book reviews tell us that even in “retirement” Ida Greaves maintained an interest in political economy, looking to it for encouragement and enlightenment on the major issues of the day. I hope that she enjoyed these years but I have no information on where and how she spent the final decades of her life. She died in Richmond, London, in July 1990, aged 83. Figure P.1 is a Timeline of Ida Greaves’ career. It shows the extent of her travels, and the remarkable scope of her education and employment, during the first half of the twentieth century. Notes 1 Phyllis Deane (1948) The Measurement of Colonial National Incomes, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Occasional Papers XI, Cambridge University Press. 2 Phyllis Deane (1948) “The Future of the Colonies” with Julian Huxley, Issue 8 of Target for Tomorrow, Pilot Press, London. 3 Colonial Office CO 852/1356/5 Memorandum on Rural Indebtedness. 4 Creech-Jones served as Secretary of State for the Colonies until the Labour defeat in 1950. In 1947, he chaired the British West Indies Conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He was a great supporter of Rita Hinden, and together they published many short Treatises on decolonisation, Griffiths et al. (1950 Griffiths 1950) The Way Forward, Fabian Publications & Victor Gollanez, London. 5 See Peter Bauer (1971) “The Operation and Consequences of the State Export Monopolies in West Africa” Chapter 12 in Dissent on Development, Reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1954). 6 CO 967/13 66345 “Colonial Policy in the Reconstruction Period” 1941. 7 See the History of Economic Thought Website at www.hetwebsite.net for an account of the history and present activities of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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References Bauer, P.T. (1948) “Report on a Visit to the Rubber Growing Smallholdings of Malaya, July-September 1946”, Colonial Research Publications, No. 1, HMSO London Bauer, P.T. (1954) West African Trade: A Study of Competition, Oligopoly and Monopoly in a Changing Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Bauer, P.T. (1971) “The Operation and Consequences of the State Export Monopolies in West Africa”, Chapter 12 in Dissent on Development, Reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1954) Colonial Office (1941) “Colonial Policy in the Reconstruction Period”, CO 967/ 13/66345 Colonial Office (1944) Colonial Economic Statistics, CEAC (Research) (44) 18 Colonial Office (1945) Memorandum on Colonial Economic Research, CEAC (Research) 45/41, Ida Greaves, secretary Colonial Office (1946) Memorandum on Rural Indebtedness, submitted to the CEDC Research sub-committee CO 852/1356/5, Phyllis Deane, secretary Creech-Jones, A. and R. Hinden (1945) Colonies and International Conscience, Report to the Fabian Colonial Bureau, August Deane, Phyllis (1945) The Future of the Colonies (with J. Huxley), London, Pilot Deane, Phyllis (1948) The Measurement of Colonial National Incomes, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Occasional Papers, XI, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Griffiths, James, Creech-Jones, Arthur and Hinden, Rita (1950) The Way Forward, Fabian Publications & Victor Gollancz, London Meier, Gerald and Seers, Dudley (1984) Pioneers in Development, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Appendix The Currency Board Mechanism and the Sterling Area

Currency boards are now comparatively rare, though they have advocates, and there are present-day examples. Currency boards were once much more common, in that they underpinned a wide range of colonial monetary systems. The model for many subsequent manifestations was the West African Currency Board, set up in 1912. The Bank of West Africa was established in 1895, on the initiative of Sir Alfred Jones of the Shipping Line Elder Dempster & Co. The Bank was granted the monopoly of the importation of British silver coin from the Mint, and the responsibility of repatriating surplus coin. By 1896, West Africa was absorbing 25 per cent of the Mint’s output of silver coin, and the question arose as to whether the colonial government was entitled to claim a share of the seigniorage. To facilitate this, a committee was set up in 1911, to consider the introduction of a special coinage into West Africa. As a result the West African Currency Board was formed in 1912, with the Bank of British West Africa as its agent. It issued the special silver coinage to circulate in the four territories of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gambia. Seigniorage, which in the event proved less than had been hoped, was to be distributed among the four colonies. It was in practice a sterling exchange standard, in which West African money was held at par with sterling. On the origins of the West African Currency Board, see Hopkins (1970). The Treasury was anxious to reconcile differences between the gold-using and silver using parts of the Empire, in a way which did not undermine sterling. In the United Kingdom, silver was only a token coin. In West Africa, silver was the most important money. The growth of trade in West Africa brought the unwelcomed prospect of the return to the United Kingdom of a large number of depreciating silver coins. The answer was to produce a separate colonial currency whose supply was strictly controlled. By 1950, the British colonial currency board system covered West Africa, East Africa, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Mauritius, West Indies, Malaya and certain other territories. Figure A.1 is designed to show the

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Appendix THE CURRENCY BOARD MECHANISM (Circa 1950) LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

COLONIAL BANK

LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

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LOCAL CURRENCY BOARD

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PR OF ITS c.

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LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

se

LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

(In

STERLING

ag e)

LONDON HEAD OFFICE

LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

CURRENCY BOARD (LONDON)

CROWN AGENTS

STERLING

TREASURY BILLS SHORT TERM SECURITIES

RESERVES GILT_EDGED INVESTMENT

LONDON MONEY MARKET

CAPITAL MOVEMENTS CURRENCY BOARD PROFITS STERLING LOCAL NOTES AND COINS

Figure A.1 The Currency Board Mechanism (Circa 1950).

COLONIAL STOCK

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currency board system as it operated circa 1950, in those territories of the Sterling Area, which did not have autonomy in monetary affairs. The currency board could be in any one of four forms. A currency commissioner might operate in individual territories. A local currency board could be created by local legislation (Malaya). A currency board in London could be created by executive act of the Colonial Secretary (East and West Africa) or the currency board could take the form of co-operation between the commercial banks and government (Hong Kong). The common feature was that there were no local central banks. The currency was covered wholly by sterling assets. In the currency board, local currency exchanged for foreign currency at fixed rates. Whatever the form of the currency board, its function was to change sterling into the local medium of circulation (notes and coins). The money supply depended on the currency supply plus the credit creation of the commercial banks. The upper limit on credit creation was set by liquid assets (i.e. local currency plus reserves) but clearly was also constrained by the balance of payments. Some currency boards worked well in the period during which they operated. British East Asia was a good example. In 1956, the Colonial Office published a well-researched study on British East Asia (King, 1956) which showed that although colonial monetary systems appeared similar, they had important differences which according to its author made generalities extremely dangerous. Both Malaya and Hong Kong had long-standing and highly developed banking systems. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation could initiate policies which had macroeconomic effects. In 1955, for example, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank decided that there was an unusual amount of speculation on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Accordingly the Bank (together with other note issuing banks) raised the rate of interest on advances from 5 per cent to 8 per cent. There was an immediate effect on the stock exchange (a sharp fall then recovery) and a gradual fall in the price level to the level prevailing earlier in the year. “The Bank’s policy had been successful without any compulsory powers, without even the prestige of being a central bank” (King, op. cit. 1956). The situation in the Malayan currency area (Malaya, Singapore and Borneo) which was not as well developed economically as Hong Kong was not directly comparable with Hong Kong, but even so there was a well-functioning commercial banking system with 45 overseas and 22 indigenous banks operating in the area in 1956. Sidney Caine and G.M. Watson could justifiably point out in their Report on the Establishment of a Central Bank in Malaya (1956) that Malaya already possessed the essentials of a good monetary and banking system.

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The perceived benefits of colonial monetary arrangements, however did not apply to the majority of those countries of the Sterling Area which provided its inner core after 1945. In colonial West Africa, Newlyn and Rowan (1954) argued that the currency boards were there simply to issue as much local currency as the commercial banks wanted to buy for sterling. Existing banks were more or less extensions of the UK banking system with credit policies determined in London on branch banking principles. There was nothing technically amiss with these arrangements, but as Keynes recognised in his exchange with Caine, there is more to banking than technical issues. In circumstances where banking policy is essentially conservative and the country could attract little in the way of inward investment, the impact of the currency board system was deflationary. Arguments about currency boards also tended to become submerged in the larger issue of sterling balances. After 1930, sterling was in a persistently weak position as an international reserve currency. A currency board arrangement only works to the advantage of a colony if the currency to which it is tied is strong and respected. Otherwise all the problems of the weak currency – overvalued exchange rates, depreciating assets and speculative pressures – are transmitted to the colony via the currency board mechanism. Moreover, unless there is a liberal structure of exchange arrangements, the colony is unable to make appropriate policy adjustments. During the period 1930–1939 sterling was a freely convertible currency, and had attracted countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden to link to sterling at varying parities. When war broke out in 1939, countries floated off sterling. Those countries mainly Dominions and dependencies which remained, had to accept exchange control. Within the Sterling Area payments were unrestricted. Those with the rest of the world, dollar transactions in particular, were controlled. The sterling balances arose as hard currency income was remitted to London. Because liberation of the sterling balances could have placed sterling under severe strain, restrictions were placed on their use. In 1945, the sterling area countries had balances of some £2,700 million, in effect a huge interest-free loan which had eased the financial burden of war. Countries involved were free to use sterling in order to make payments within the area, but restrictions were placed on the drawing down of sterling balances in order to make payments to hard currency countries. By the early 1950s, the main components of the sterling assets were colonial government funds, funds held by the colonial currency boards, marketing board reserves and funds held with UK banks. They originated in the trade balances of the dependent colonies.

Appendix

127

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Index

Page numbers followed by “n” indicate notes. agriculture 1, 25, 30, 37, 42–43, 50, 55, 66, 68–69, 83, 86n7 American Academy of Political and Social Science 121, 121n7 Archdale, Elizabeth (Betty) 13–15, 28n6, 33–35, 37, 40, 40n7; cricket 28n6, 33, 36; Crosby Hall 34–35; education at St Leonards 13; Emmeline Pankhurst 13; feminist activities 13, 36; graduates from McGill 14; studying in London 14; suffragette circles 13, 28n6, 35; Swan House 34–35, 37; yearbook Old McGill 14, 15 Archdale, Helen 13, 35 Bank of England 88–93, 101n1, 101n5, 101n6 Barbados 1–9, 16, 32, 34, 38, 54, 58, 72–75, 77, 79, 84 Barnard College 54, 59, 60, 61 Barrow, Errol 16 Barrow, Nita 3, 4 Bauer, Peter 44, 118, 119; state export monopolies 119, 121n5 Beckford, George 48, 111 Benham, Frederic 70; Survey of Jamaica 70 Bourdillon, Sir Bernard 91, 94 Brazil 16, 24, 48, 54, 58, 62n5 British Bank of West Africa 98 British Federation of University Women 34, 40

Bryn Mawr College 30–34, 40n5; Bryn Mawr Residential Fellowship 32–33; discriminatory admissions and hiring policies 33–34, 40n5 Burns, Eveline Mabel 60, 62n7 Caine, Sidney 79, 81, 84, 89, 93, 101n5, 101n6; attachment to classical trade theory 110; correspondence with Keynes 89, 90, 101n1; Ida Greaves’ honorarium 81–82; reference for Ida Greaves 82–83 Canada 9–11; Black migration 17–22. See also Greaves, Ida Cecil, Masters Thesis Canadian Federation of University Women 27; application from Ida Greaves 27 Caribbean 9, 10, 18, 20, 49, 52n6, 72, 111 Carr-Saunders, Alexander 80–83, 87 central banks in developing countries 106, 107, 110; problems of the Sterling Area 107 Clark, Charles 6 Collier, Irwin 40n1, 40n5 Colonial Development and Welfare Acts 66, 72; funding for Ida Greaves’ research 95 Colonial Development Corporation 68, 78–79

Index Colonial Economic Advisory Committee (CEAC) 64–65, 67; Finance Sub-Committee 89–91, 93, 101n4; Ida Greaves, Secretary 67, 70, 71; Replacement by Colonial Economic Development Council (CEDC) 84; Research SubCommittee 65, 86n4, 86n5 Colonial Economic Development Council (CEDC) 84 Colonial Economic Research Committee (CERC) See Research Sub-Committee Colonial Monetary Conditions 88, 91, 98, 101n7 colonial monetary system 74, 79, 88, 98–100, 103, 105–106, 108, 110, 113n5 Colonial Office 54, 65–68 Colonial Social Science Research Council 66, 80 Colson, Elizabeth 117 Columbia University, New York 59, 60, 62n6 Commons, John R. 28n3, 60, 108 comparative methodology 70, 71 Confederacy 20; defeat in the Civil War 20; effect of defeat on black migrants into Canada 20 conspicuous consumption 11, 12 cricket clubs in Montreal 23 Crosby Hall, Chelsea 34, 35 Crown Agents 89, 91–93, 106, 107 currency board system 99; deflationary bias 92, 93, 99 Currie, Arthur W. 27; reference for Ida Greaves 27 Dagg, Anne Innis 24 Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia 24; black history program 24 Deane, Phyllis 116–119; biography of John Neville Keynes 116; Secretary of the CEDC 116 Decolonisation 80, 83, 88, 103–104, 106, 117, 121n4 Democratic Party in US 56; institutionalist economists as advisers 56; opposition to colonial acquisitions 55, 56

137

Durbin, Evan 64, 65 economic man 45; Ida Greaves’ critique of Marshall 45; in Marshallian economics 45 Employment 13, 18, 49–50; Blacks low-paid jobs in Canada 18, 20, 23 Fenwick, Charles 33, 34 Gold Coast 48, 89, 95–97, 101n10, 113, 114n14 Goodenough, Sir William 91; as Chairman of Barclays 91 Gorell Barnes, William 94 Grattan Bushe, Sir Henry 72 Greaves, Ida Cecil; abstracts of social science textbooks 61; Barnard College 54, 59–61; Bryn Mawr 30, 32–34; Bryn Mawr research topic 33; Correspondence with Arnold Plant 64, 66, 72–79; courses and seminars at LSE 17; early education 3, 4–7; fieldwork in West Africa 95, 96–98; fieldwork in West Indies 95–97; Graduate Fellowship at McGill 14, 16; Grassfield School, Barbados 4; Hawaiian sugar industry 58; Hutchinson Medal 38, 41n15; Iowa State College 54, 55, 57, 59; Jewish Telegraph Agency 14, 28n8; London School of Economics 30, 33–35, 37–38, 40n10, 41n15; LSE Studentship for Women 33, 35, 38, 39, 41n14; Masters Thesis 6, 9, 18, 22, 27, 33; political economy club 11; Questions of Policy in Management of Colonial Currencies 91, 101n3; Radcliffe College 30, 31–32, 40n2, 88; Radcliffe College research topic 32; Radcliffe College transcript 31; San Juan, Puerto Rico, for Pan American Union 111, 112, 114n13; Secretary to the Colonial Research SubCommittee See Colonial

138

Index Economic Advisory Committee (CEAC); St Winifred’s School, Barbados 4; study of political economy 11–12, 27, 29n16; Whitney Fellowship in Economics 31; Yearbook, Old McGill 14

Hans Materschlager See John Mars Harrod, Roy 104, 105 Hawaii 57, 58, 62n5 Hazlewood, Arthur 104 Henderson, Hubert 64, 65 Hill, Polly 52n6, 113 Hinden, Rita 116, 117, 121n4 Homo oeconomicus See economic man Hong Kong 91, 105, 123, 125 Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation 125 Hopkins, A.G. 56, 62n2, 62n3, 123 Hutchinson Medal See Greaves, Ida Cecil Hutt, W.H.; Review of Greaves Modern Production among Backward Peoples 50, 51 Huxley, Julian 116, 121n2 Ida Greaves Bursary, Victoria College 13 imperialism, Ida Greaves’ critique 55, 56, 58; lenient critics of imperialism, Britain, France, Netherlands 55 inductive economics; in Lewis’s The Theory of Economic Growth 71 Institutionalist economics, interwar period 60, 70–71; absence of theory of money 110 Iowa State College See Greaves, Ida Cecil Jamaica 95 Jewish Students at McGill 15, 16, 28n8 Journal of Negro History 17, 28n11 Kenya 50, 69, 77 Kenya Railway underfunded cost 56 Keynes, John Maynard 89–90, 93, 101n1, 101n2, 103, 114 Keynes, John Neville 116

King, Frank H.H. 105; Money in British East Asia 105 labour supply 49, 50–51, 54–55, 57 Lady Rhondda (Margaret Haig Thomas) 13, 34–36; Six Point Group 34, 35, 37; Time and Tide magazine 35 Landon, Fred 17, 24, 28n11, 28n12, 28n13; Review of Ida Greaves’ Masters thesis 18 Las Palmas, Grand Canaria 97; currency market 97 Latin American structuralists 49 Leacock, Professor Stephen 11–12, 27n2; attitude to women 14, 17; colonial connections 12; doctoral thesis at Chicago 12; as economist 27n2; Elements of Political Science 12; empire trade 13; humourist writer 11; institutionalist economics 12; museum in Orillia 18; policies on income distribution 13, 28n4; Packet-Times Press 18; politics 13; supervision of Ida Greaves’ thesis 16, 17, 21; The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice 13 Lewis, W. Arthur 64, 65, 70–71; lecturer in Colonial Economics 80; resignation from CEAC 65 Lockhart, Charles Ramsdale 61, 68–70, 78–79 Lugard, Frederick 80 Macpherson, Deirdre, author 28n6; The Suffragettes Daughter, Betty Archdale: Her Life of Feminism, Cricket, War and Education Malayan Currency Area 125 Malvern 4, 5, 8; private boarding schools 4 Malvern Girls’ College 3–8 Mars, John 93, 94 Marshall, Alfred 45; critique of Principles of Economics 45, 46 McGill News 10, 24; Slavery and its Supercession 29

Index McGill University 6, 11, 13, 19, 27n1; archives, 1929 Yearbook 7; conservative culture 11; Department of Economics and Political Science 11, 17; destination for Jewish students 15; major benefactors 11 Memorandum on Colonial Economic Research 86n4 Memorandum: Questions of Policy in the Management of Currencies 91, 101n3 Mill, John Stuart 31, 32, 109, 111, 114 Mitchell, Wesley 60 Modern Production among Backward Peoples 42–53; Austin Robinson review 51; change of title 43, 44; critique of Marshall 45; homo oeconomicus 46; plantation and peasant production 47–48; roundabout production 46 Montreal 10, 21 Montreal Manufacturers’ Graduate Fellowship 14 Montreal University 23 Myrdal, Gunnar 119

139

correspondence with Ida Greaves 54, 64, 66. See also Greaves, Ida 72–79; doctoral students 37, 38, 40n11, 41n13; economics of race relations 37; reference for Ida Greaves 38, 41n15, 57, 66 Plantation School of social scientists 111 Plantation Systems of the New World 111, 114n13, 114n15 political economy 62n6 Puerto Rico See Pan American Union

Orduna liner 4, 8n1 Overseas Food Corporation 68; Ida Greaves’ reservations 78, 79

Radcliffe College 30–31, 32; female students’ petition 31; Harvard professors’ contracts 30 Report on Colonial Economic Research 86n4 Report on Colonial Monetary Conditions 91. See also Greaves, Ida Cecil Richards, Audrey 74, 79, 80, 116 Riddell, W.R. 17 Robbins, Lionel 64, 65, 81 Robey, Ralph 60, 61 Robinson, Austin; Ida Greaves’ research methods 50, 71, 116; Review of Ida Greaves’ Modern Production among Backward Peoples 43, 50, 71 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 62, 62n3 Rosenberg, Nathan 26; Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations 29 roundabout process of production 46, 51 Royal Victoria College 11, 13, 27; See also Ida Greaves Bursary Rugg, Harold 60

Packet Times Press, Orillia 18 Pan American Union 111; Seminar, Puerto Rico 111, 114n13; See also Greaves, Ida Cecil Para, Brazil 54 Perham, Margery 80, 85, 93, 116, 117 pioneer development economists 118 Plant, Arnold 37, 41n12, 54, 57; Colonial Development Corporation 78;

Sayers, Professor Richard 94 Sephardic Jews in Barbados 16 Sierra Leone Company 19 Slavery 18–20, 24–26, 29n15, 50, 57, 58, 108, 111; abolition of 19, 20, 24–26, 58 Smith, Adam 26, 31 St Michael Girls’ School, Barbados 3, 4 St Winifred’s School, Barbados 4 Stanley, Oliver 64, 65

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 60, 61 Netherlands 55, 56 New Deal 56 Norman, Montagu 107, 113n7 Nova Scotia 19, 22, 24 Nuffield College 93. See also Margery Perham

140

Index

Sterling Area 104, 106–108, 113n9; discrimination against dollar exports 108–109, 113n8, 113n9 sterling balances 89, 97, 99, 104, 107 Stockdale, Frank 67, 68, 70 Stouffer, Allen P. 23, 29n14 sugar 1, 9, 16, 25, 32, 54, 57–58, 62n5, 89, 109, 111–112 summer schools, Oxford and Cambridge 68, 85, 86n8 Supervisory Committee, Colonial Office 94–95, 100, 101n7

UN Division of Non-Self-Governing Territories 74–76; Oxford graduates in 76 Underground Railroad 17, 20 University of Montreal, discrimination 23 US Council on Foreign Relations 55; Journal Foreign Affairs 55, 58, 62n1 US Social Science Research Council 56; Ida Greaves’ application for Grant-in-Aid 56–57

Taussig, Frank William 31, 32, 75; classical trade theory 31; critic of the institutionalist school 32 Thakkar, Parth 101n11, 113n2, 114n12 Time and Tide, see Lady Rhondda Trevor, Sir Cecil 8, 96, 97; Report on Banking Conditions in the Gold Coast and the Question of Setting Up a National Bank 101n10 Trinidad 2, 19, 23, 48, 83, 95 Tugwell, Rexford 28n3, 60, 62n3

Veblen, Thorstein 12, see also Leacock, Professor Stephen Wealth of Nations 26, 29n16 West African Currency Board 123 Whitney Fellowship in Economics 30–32 Wilberforce, William 19 Wilkinson, Ellen, Labour MP 13, 40n7 Winks, Robin 24, 28n14 Wright, Kenneth M. 108, 109