Arthur Lewis was the first black academic at LSE. At a time when UK higher education is starting to think about the lack of black people in academia, Sue Donnelly looks back at Arthur Lewis’ life and hurdles at the time.
This post was originally published on the LSE History Blog.
23 January 2015 marks the centenary of the birth of the Nobel Prize winning economist, William Arthur Lewis (1915-1991) – whose appointment in 1938 to a one year teaching contract, later converted to a four year appointment, makes him LSE’s first black academic.
Lewis was born in St Lucia and left school at 14 after completing the curriculum, working as a clerk in the civil service. Lewis’s ambition was to be an engineer, but aware that neither the government nor white businesses would employ a black engineer he decided on a career in business and planned to study business administration. In 1932 Lewis won a government scholarship to study in Britain and in 1933 arrived at LSE to study for the B.Commerce degree.
LSE’S B.Commerce degree started in 1919 and students studied economic theory and economic history alongside statistics, accounting, commercial law and elements of geography. The course was taught by LSE luminaries such as Lionel Robbins, Friedrich Hayek, John Hicks and Arnold Plant who was Professor of Commerce. Plant, who had taught in South Africa, was interested in the economic impact of racial discrimination particularly on the labour market, and was supportive of Lewis throughout his time at LSE. In his Nobel Prize biography Lewis called his studies at LSE “marvellous intellectual feasts”. In 1938 Lewis obtained at first class degree and obtained a scholarship to begin a PhD. His thesis The Economics of Loyalty Contracts was completed in 1940.
Although academic life was successful Lewis later recalled that he was “subjected to all the usual disabilities – refusal of accommodation, denial of jobs for which he had been recommended, generalised discourtesy and the rest”. In 1937, despite his first class degree, he was rejected by the Colonial Services for a post as an administrator in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Ironically by 1941 he was undertaking research for the Colonial Office.
Lewis’s appointment to a temporary assistant lectureship in 1938 reflected this ambivalence. Although the decision to appoint Lewis was unanimous the LSE Director, Alexander Carr-Saunders felt the need to restrict his teaching and explain the appointment to the Court of Governors:
“He would therefore not see students individually but in groups. The Appointments Committee is, as I said, quite unanimous but recognise that the appointment of a coloured man may possibly be open to some criticism. Normally, such appointments do not require the confirmation of the Governors but on this occasion I said that I should before taking any action submit the matter to you.”
This did not prevent Hayek describing Lewis as one “one of our best teachers”. During LSE’s evacuation to Cambridge during the Second World War as one of the few teachers not called up for civil or war service, Lewis undertook a heavy burden of teaching – particularly as his classes contained both LSE and Cambridge students. The 1942-1943 LSE Calendar records that Lewis was teaching transport economics, and business economics alongside an elements of economics course which included money, banking and international trade. In 1944 colonial economics was added to the list and in 1947 Lewis was appointed Reader in Colonial Economics.
Alongside this heavy teaching load Lewis was also working for the Colonial Office after being recommended by LSE as “the most suitable member of staff” to undertake a report on the financing of mining and industrial development in the colonies. Some Aspects of the Flow of Capital into the British Colonies was published in 1942 and was followed by further reports and Lewis’ appointment as secretary to the newly formed Colonial Economic Advisory Committee (CEAC). Lewis’ desire to set economic research in the context of the wider needs of Britain’s colonies often conflicted with the Colonial Office’s narrow technocratic agenda and Lewis’s 1944 resignation letter described his time as secretary as “largely a waste of time” – but it helped in defining his views on development economics.
In 1948 Lewis joined Manchester University as a full professor, leaving in 1957 to advise the government of newly independent Ghana. He was Principal of University College of the West Indies becoming the first Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He was knighted in 1963 and from 1963-1983 held a professorship at Princeton University. He also headed up the Caribbean Development Bank.
In 1979 Sir Arthur Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics for “pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries”. He died in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1991.
Sue Donnelly is the Archivist at LSE.
Sir Arthur Lewis was without doubt one of the brightest and most brilliant thinkers the Caribbean has ever produced. Many here still remark that the power of his intellect was so great that it hindered his ideas from gaining acceptance because local Caribbean politicians did not understand exactly what he was laying out.
It should also be noted he left the Caribbean in the 1930s as a fighter for workers rights, and returned after his Colonial encounter at LSE as a trojan horse fighting for capital instead of his Caribbean workers. And another very influential Caribbean scholar Lloyd Best was quite critical of Lewis’ actions on his return
The failed economic formula for Caribbean development was that championed by Sir Arthur in the 1950s and 60s and labelled ‘Industrialisation by Invitation’.
This quote from Eric St Cyr illustrates the great damage it did to the Caribbean, no matter the support it had from Lewis and his professors from LSE. It was an ill-conceived form of development from which the Caribbean has never recovered and still lives many of its socio-economic consequences.
It is an example of how Western politics and intellectualism kept down the colonies and prevented them from developing to levels that could have competed with other areas of the world.
We might even say white supremacy hidden in the halls of LSE in the 40s and 50s took Sir Arthur and sent him back to us forever compromised.
“As implemented, this strategy [‘Industrialisation by Invitation’] has not produced the anticipated results because the analysis on which it was based did not explicitly distinguish between an offshore sector of Caribbean economy, where foreign enterprise and capital have always had sway, and an onshore sector where the residentiary population operates. Lewis’ theory needed to be more precisely located in Caribbean empirical reality. The problem Lewis addressed was the low level of income which the Caribbean economy of 1950 afforded its members. To Lewis, low incomes resulted from low productivity in its principal industry, namely agriculture. In order to raise factor productivity, agriculture needed to be mechanized to raise the land/man ratio since output per acre already compared favourably internationally but output per man was low. There was however a severe constraint on land space in these small island territories of mountainous terrain. Labour therefore had to be removed from the land to make room for mechanization. In the European experience, with which he was familiar, this was achieved by shifting labour from agriculture to manufacturing, from the land to the factory. The Lewis’ strategy thus required that manufacturing industry be established as necessary to raising productivity in agriculture. There were however the problems of capitalizing manufacturing and finding markets for its output. This is the context in which foreign investors were to be invited to establish and capitalize their enterprises and produce for overseas markets initially. The record shows that Caribbean governments gave generous incentives to foreign capital through the various Pioneer Industries Ordinances, and that there was much foreign capital invested throughout the Caribbean. The vast bulk of the investments however went into resource based industries in the offshore sector – petroleum in Trinidad, bauxite in Guyana and Jamaica, tourism in Barbados, Bahamas and the OECS, sugar in Trinidad, Guyana and Belize, citrus in Belize and bananas in the OECS. Few investments were made onshore complementing the surplus labour in that sector”(St Cyr 2009:1-2)
St Cyr, Eric 2009. The Macro Economic Framework: “Valid Theory and Policy Choice”, Paper delivered at Conference on the Economy, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus