As promised last week, I will do a short review of the book by Minister Carl B. Greenidge, titled, Empowering a Peasantry in a Caribbean Context: The Case of Land Settlement Schemes in Guyana, 1865 – 1985 (UWI Press, 2001). This book is important because it provides insights into the post-2015 policymaking by the PNCR, which I argued in a previous essay determines the core agenda of the APNU+AFC government. The leaders of the AFC are expected to enjoy their personal privileges and leave policy to the PNCR.
Greenidge outlines the African village movement between 1838 and 1852. He touched on several of the constraints faced by the nascent African-Guianese peasantry. These constraints – as well as those faced by indentured immigrants – were also examined by other researchers, such as A. Young (1958), L. Despres (1967), A. Adamson (1972), J. Mandle (1973, 1982), W. Rodney (1981), C. Seecharan (1997) and others. Greenidge places the blame on the shoulders of the colonial administration of the time. The colonial administration had no interest in providing the public goods of drainage and irrigation, farm to market roads, health facilities, and similar, to the new African peasants. Instead, all resources went into protecting the interests of big sugar. I like the book because it is doing economic history, which anchors the events in good economic theory.
The book explained later land settlement schemes (LSS), such as those for Indian-Guianese. The primary purpose of Indian LSS was to tie them to the sugar-plantation economic system in order to maintain a surplus labour situation, which meant decades of low wages. Indians were offered the option of purchasing lands instead of the return passage to India. The purpose here was to get them to live close to the sugar plantations in order to maintain the surplus labour force. Although he alluded to this fact, I am not sure Greenidge fully fleshed out the implication of a plantation economy for the people living in it.
