My first encounter with the West Indies was in the Christmas vacation 1960, when my
Toronto professor B.S. Keirstead was at Mona at the invitation of Arthur Lewis. I was asked to help with the completion of a study for the (then) Government of the West Indies on Inter-Territorial Freight Rates and the Federal Shipping Service (ISER, Jamaica 1963). This assignment took me to Trinidad, and then back to Jamaica. I renewed acquaintance with student friends from England including Lloyd Braithwaite, Gladstone (Charlie) Mills, and many others. I also met a number of (then) young West Indian economists including Alister McIntyre, Lloyd Best and William Demas. I was attracted by their brilliance and enthusiasm and their intellectual efforts to break out of colonial modes of thinking and to construct new paradigms suited to the development of the Caribbean. I concluded that these were my kind of people and that I would use my position at McGill to assist in training young West Indian economists to contribute to such a project.
Shortly after the foundation of the Centre For Developing Area Studies at McGill in 1963, I invited William Demas to spend a year at McGill as the first visiting Research Fellow of the Center. The result was The Economics of Development in Small Countries with Special Reference to the Caribbean (1965).
Alister McIntyre, then teaching on the Mona Campus, encouraged a strem of student to come to McGill for graduate studies. Among them Edwin Carrington, Ainsworth Harewood and Adlith Brown. We formed a Montreal Group of the New World Movement and in 1967 I co-authored a book on Canada West Indies Economic Relations with Alister McIntyre with assistance of West Indian graduate students. .
As early as 1962, I began to collaborate with Lloyd Best and in 1966 we obtained a grant to enable Best to join me at McGill in the production of research on ‘Externally Propelled Growth and Industrialization in the Caribbean’, in which we developed the “Plantation Economy” paradigm. The work remained unpublished, although four volumes of mimeograph text were produced in 1969. At the insistence of Lloyd Best in 1968, the New World Quarterly published my essay on ‘Economic Dependence and Political Disintegration: The Case of Canada’. This relatively obscure Caribbean publication circulated widely among Canadian students, and I was encouraged to elaborate the text which was published as Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada in 1970.
On the occasion of a visit to the St. Augustine campus of UWI in 1964, Lloyd Best spoke with the greatest admiration of George Beckford, who had recently arrived on the St. Augustine campus as a lecturer in agricultural economics in the Faculty of Agriculture. Unfortunately, I was not able to meet him on that occasion, but met him later at Mona. Concerned that the Best-Levitt work remained unpublished, Beckford insisted that I prepare a summary published as “Characteristics of Plantation Economy” in Beckford (ed) Caribbean Economy (1975).
On the basis of my experience in multi-sectoral economic accounting, and my knowledge of Caribbean economies, I was employed as national income advisor on the construction of a system of National Accounts for Trinidad and Tobago (1969 to 1973). In 1974 I served as Professor at the Institute of International Relations at St. Augustine, UWI. In 1978 I accepted an invitation as Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Mona 1978 – 1980. From 1989-1995, I taught a course on Theories of Economic Development at the Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences at Mona. In 1995, I was appointed first George Beckford Professor in Caribbean Political Economy, and produced, with Michael Witter, an edited volume entitled Critical Thought in Caribbean Political Economy: The Legacy of
George Beckford, (1996). At this time I also collected and edited George Beckford’s work, published as The George Beckford Papers, (2000). Since 2002 I have been working on the preparation of the Best-Levitt work for publication and we expect that it will finally see the light of day as: The Plantation Economy Models: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development in 2007. In 2005 a collection of my Caribbean work was published as: Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community, by Ian Randle Publishers. The book was formally launched on July 5, 2006 at an event hosted by the Governor of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago. On the following day a Roundtable was organized at the Institute of International Relations by the Critical Perspectives Group and Dennis Pantin, Chair of the Department of Economics on the St. Augustine Campus. The book was also launched at the Mona Campus under the auspices of the Center for Caribbean Thought and the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies in July 2006.