Visualising
Extractive
Capitalism in the
Caribbean

Early settlers in Barbados, following the example of Virginia, grew tobacco. Many were smallholders, and while there were some Native American and African slaves, labour was provided by indentured white servants, many of them prisoners, some simply kidnapped from Britain and Ireland. In the 17th century, to “barbadoes” someone meant to forcibly ship them somewhere else to work.¹²

As the world tobacco market grew more saturated, colonists turned to the crop that would come to dominate the political economy of Barbados for the next 300 years: sugar cane.

The shift to sugar as the island’s staple crop transformed patterns of labour and landownership. Indentured servants were replaced by enslaved Africans...

...and smallholders were replaced by large landowners. By 1680, seven per cent of property-holders on the island controlled 54 per cent of land and 60 per cent of enslaved people.¹³

This was due to the rise of the plantation as the primary method of production.

From the 8th century CE, Arab expansion introduced the cultivation of sugar cane to the Mediterranean, including on the islands of Sicily, Malta and Cyprus, in Morocco, and in southern Spain. However, rain and seasonable temperature fluctuations were an obstacle to growing sugar outside of the warmer months.¹⁴

By the 15th century, Spain and Portugal had developed sugar industries on the Atlantic Islands of Madeira, the Canary Islands and São Tomé. These were the first experiments in combining enslaved African labour with European capital and white settler supervision, a model that would later spread across the Americas.¹⁵

Plantations were “a synthesis of factory and field”, both an industrial and an agricultural enterprise.¹⁶ As soon as it was harvested, the cane needed to be crushed and boiled to produce unrefined sugar and molasses. This required a mix of unskilled field labour and skilled labour in the mill and boiling house, with their activity closely coordinated.

The plantation changed the landscape and demographics of Barbados beyond recognition. As it turned British capital, African slave labour, and food, clothes and other imports from Britain and New England into unrefined sugar and molasses, it shaped the accumulation of wealth on both sides of the Atlantic.

An estimated 12 million Africans were forcibly taken to the Americas during the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Of these, Britain was responsible for transporting an estimated 3.1 million, of whom 400,000 died during the crossing.¹⁷

Liverpool, London and Bristol accounted for over 90 per cent of the British slave trade, sending out 5,300, 3,100 and 2,200 voyages respectively.¹⁸

Between 1640 and 1807, some 387,000 enslaved people were transported from West Africa to Barbados alone.¹⁹

On arrival, the fate of these enslaved people in Barbados was to be dehumanised and treated as equivalent to livestock. After being sold, most would be subject to a period of “seasoning” to acclimatise them to brutal labour conditions on plantations.

On Codrington Plantation in the mid-18th century, 43 per cent of enslaved Africans died within three years of their arrival, with disease, malnutrition and suicide the common causes of death.²⁰

Enslaved people were expected to perform back-breaking labour, from digging cane-holes to harvesting, crushing and boiling the cane, with the latter taking place day and night in the harvest season. Night shifts would either be from 8pm until midnight or from midnight until 6am, with enslaved people then expected to work in the fields for twelve hours until sunset.²¹

Extraordinary violence was a regular feature of enslaved people’s lives. Whippings, amputations, executions, solitary confinement, and leg and neck irons, were all used to instil fear and exert control.²²

In such conditions — exhausting labour, the physical toll of punishment, malnutrition, disease and poor housing — mortality for enslaved people in Barbados was high: 29 years at birth by one estimate.²³

This was the incalculable human cost of the economic system of the trade in enslaved people.

The transport of enslaved people across the Atlantic formed part of two triangles of trade emerging from 17th century. Finished goods from Britain were sold in Africa, enslaved Africans were sold to the Americas, and American commodities like sugar were sold to Britain…

… and Caribbean molasses were sold to New England, New England rum to Africa and enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.

As well as direct profit from the buying and selling of enslaved Africans, Britain also benefited from developing a West African market for their finished goods.

Records from the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on English trade with Africa until 1697 show the mix of exports involved in the late 17th century.

The slave trade and the associated trades in goods and manufactures stimulated the growth of British shipping. From 1560 to 1857, the tonnage of English-owned merchant shipping increased almost a hundredfold: from 50,000 tonnes to 4,211,000 tonnes. This growth was largely due to foreign trade.²⁴

Liverpool, highly active in the African trade, saw a boom in shipping and shipbuilding activity which reverberated through the North West.

The first recorded slave ship to sail from Liverpool left the port on 3rd October 1699 and carried 220 enslaved Africans to Barbados.²⁵

The city later became “the metropolis of slavery”, delivering an estimated 1,200,000 enslaved people to the Americas.²⁶

From 1750 to 1807, between one-third and one-half of Liverpool’s trade was with Africa and the Caribbean. In the late 18th century, it controlled 80 per cent of the British slave trade and over 40 per cent of the European trade. Many buildings in the city were built using money from this trade, including the Town Hall.²⁷

Liverpool was strategically well-positioned to access goods to export to Africa, such as textiles from Lancashire and Yorkshire, pottery, copper and brass from Staffordshire and Cheshire and guns from Birmingham.²⁸

As a result of its engagement in the slave trade, shipbuilding in Liverpool boomed throughout the 18th century.

Shipbuilders took lumber from Lancashire, Cheshire, Shopshire and parts of Staffordshire and Flintshire, as well as copper and iron from Lancashire. Demand for rope also led to a new ropery being established in the city which produced 1,400 tons of cordage a year, of which only 60 tons were exported.²⁹

The growth of the Atlantic economy meant ships made longer and more hazardous journeys. Marine insurance — a way of managing the risks of shipping — was well-established in England by the time Barbados was colonised, but not as a specialised activity. Usually, it was done by merchants as a side business.³⁰

The emergence of specialised institutions for marine insurance coincided with Britain’s rise as a major slave-trading power within transatlantic commerce. Although the majority of insurance policies by number in the 18th and early 19th centuries were for European voyages and voyages between British ports, the premiums were higher for long-distance voyages. As a result, the slave-economy accounted for between one-third and 40 per cent of premium income for insurers in the latter half of the 18th century.³¹

At the time of Barbados’s settlement, Amsterdam, not London, was the financial heart of Europe. By 1700, England’s capital, the heart of a thriving Atlantic empire, had supplanted the Dutch city. Its rise was enmeshed with the credit needs of plantation economies in the Caribbean, the effects of which were felt right up to the Bank of England.

Merchants and banks in London (or elsewhere) were involved directly in the slave economy by lending to planters, with capital needs especially acute in the early phases of Barbados’s settlement.

Planters continued to need credit long after the colony was first settled because purchasing an enslaved person functioned like the purchase of other capital goods — in other words, it required an upfront cost that would be recouped with an income stream over many years as that enslaved person toiled on the plantation producing sugar.³²

This burgeoning credit system meant that, because of foreclosures, banks in London increasingly came to hold interests in plantations in the Caribbean, with many receiving compensation from the British government as slave-owners when slavery was abolished in 1834.³³

As well as direct involvement, the financial system also played an important role as intermediaries in transatlantic trade.

Before the mid-18th century, this trade mostly involved barter transactions, as slave merchants would exchange goods in West Africa for enslaved people and then exchange enslaved people for sugar and other colonial produce before returning to Britain.

Over time, shipowners and planters began to deal with agency houses instead — intermediaries based in the Caribbean who would buy and sell enslaved people and planters’ produce.

These agency houses had connections with commercial and financial houses in London who provided bills of exchange, a system of long-term credit on which the agency houses would draw in their transactions.

These bills of exchange came to circulate as an increasingly important part of the British money market, integrated into the asset portfolios of banks even where these were not directly involved in the slave economy.³⁴

This web of interconnectedness was the reason why, at the end of the 19th century, the Bank of England provided support for the West India merchants, the financiers of trade with the Caribbean plantation economies. Their failure would have had knock-on effects on the industrialising North and risked destabilising British trade.

In its crisis lending in 1799, the Bank went further than usual in offering longer-term loans and lending against unusual forms of collateral.³⁵

Enslavement and empire birthed new and innovative forms of finance; perhaps unsurprising given the proportion of Bank directors involved in the slave economy went from four per cent in 1760 to 30 per cent in 1799.³⁶

The productive economy of Barbados, like all plantation colonies, was entirely focused on export crops — in this case, sugar. The island produced little of its own food and had no manufacturing sectors for textiles, metalware or household goods.

Under the mercantilist system, British imperial policy limited imports to Barbados to those from the metropole and its empire.

By 1685, London alone was exporting almost £70,000 worth of goods to Barbados a year, or £14,324,000 in current prices.³⁷

The profitability of sugar had produced a wealthy planter class with eager demand for British goods. In the late 17th century, per capita consumption was £710 in Barbados (current prices), compared to £121 in New England.³⁸

Exports included textiles, metals, clothing (such as gloves, hats and shoes), candles, barrel hoops, gunpowder, saddles and harnesses, soap and foodstuffs.³⁹ 

Silks, by the end of the 17th century, comprised around 20 per cent of London’s exports to the West Indies, stimulating the city’s silk industry, which migrated from Canterbury following the Restoration and employed around 40,000 people.⁴⁰

It was through this consumption of British-made goods that planters contributed to the wealth of the metropole even if, as in Barbados, rates of absenteeism remained lower than in the other sugar colonies.⁴¹

Meanwhile, British colonies in New England supplied Barbados and the other plantation economies with food and some other goods. In 1770, for example, these colonies sent to the Caribbean:

One-third of their exports of dried fish and almost all their pickled fish; seven-eights of their oats, seven-tenths of their corn, almost all their peas and beans, half of their flour, all their butter and cheese, over one-quarter of their rice, almost all their onions; five-sixths of their pine, oak and cedar board, over half their staves, nearly all their hoops; all their horses, sheep, hogs and poultry; almost all their soap and candles.⁴²

In the period 1768 to 1772, 64 per cent of New England’s total exports went to the Caribbean, while 66 per cent of their imports were from Great Britain.⁴³

In other words, the North American colonies used the surpluses earned through trade with the Caribbean to cover their deficit with Britain.⁴⁴

Even after American independence, although more formal barriers to trade with New England existed, American exports to the British Caribbean continued to increase, with exports from the US to the Caribbean nearly five times greater in 1801 than in 1792.⁴⁵

Toiling in the burning heat of the sun, risking limbs to the crushing rollers of the mill, sweating in the boiling house, enslaved Africans’ work produced the sugar on which fortunes were built.

Plantations in Barbados and other sugar colonies fed a voracious demand for sweetness in Britain. More than just a source of calories in the British diet, sugar was useful for preserving meats, fruits and vegetables, sweetening the hot beverages that increasingly replaced beer across the 18th century.⁴⁶

Rising sugar consumption is reflected in the fact that Britain went from, in 1660, importing 3,000 hogsheads of sugar, of which 2,000 were re-exported... 

... to importing 50,000 hogsheads and re-exporting 18,000 in 1700... 

... to importing 110,000 hogsheads in 1753, of which only 6,000 were re-exported.

British consumption of sugar and molasses generated profits for the planter class in Barbados, as well as a host of others in the commodity’s value chain. Enslaved people saw little to nothing of the wealth they had built.

For a time, Barbados was Britain’s most valuable Caribbean colony. Its sugar trade averaged £316,000 per year between 1698 and 1700, or £51,247,000 in current prices.⁴⁷

But by the early 18th century, it was surpassed by Jamaica and the Leeward Islands in terms of the value of sugar exports.

Sugar was not an industry without its risks. Natural disasters such as hurricanes could threaten crop growth, rebellions by enslaved Africans required intensive repression, and a fluctuating market price, partly in response to imperial wars between Britain, France, Spain and (eventually) the United States, were all challenges. 

Nevertheless, estimated average profits in Barbados in the 18th and early 19th centuries were between two and eleven per cent.⁴⁸

Barbados was unusual, especially among the older colonies, for having a lower rate of absentee ownership and an established white settler class.

But, across the sugar colonies, the wealth generated had permeated the British elite by the 19th century, with around one in six of the wealthiest non-landed British people in this period linked with slavery.⁴⁹

However, planters were not the only ones profiting from sugar production. They captured around one-third of the value added in the sugar commodity chain; the rest went to British-based industries including shipping and wholesaling.⁵⁰

This was largely by design: imperial policy prohibited the refining of sugar on Caribbean islands, the better to protect higher value industries in the metropole.

For example, sugar refineries sprung up across Britain, from Glasgow to London, Manchester, Newcastle, Hull and Southampton.

Bristol, as well as a major slave trading port, also had twenty sugar refineries by 1799.⁵¹ Even as its direct participation in the slave trade declined in the late 18th century, around 40 per cent of its income remained rooted in the slave economy, in part thanks to industries like sugar-refining.⁵² 

Although in one study of the value added at different stages of the sugar commodity chain, there was insufficient data to put a figure on sugar refining, we do know that the mark-up ratio between wholesale and retail prices in England was around 80 per cent.⁵³

While the slave economy and the broader world system it fed into was marked by mercantilist practices and unfree labour, it still contained certain proto-capitalist features that left their mark on the global economy for centuries to come.

Imperial policy shaped geographies of production, with higher value industries retained in the imperial centre, geographies which remained even after the formal end of protectionist laws.

The Caribbean’s place in the world system was peripheral by design, to Britain’s economic benefit.

These are hardly to be looked upon as countries, carrying on an exchange of commodities with other countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their own … [but are, rather,] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities. All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses; there is little production of anything except for staple commodities, and these are sent to England, not to be exchanged for things exported to the colony and consumed by its inhabitants, but to be sold in England for the benefit of the proprietors there.

J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848.⁵⁴

This system of interlocking trade networks across the Atlantic, which supported the rise of shipping, shipbuilding, finance and other industries in Britain could not have developed in the way it did without slavery.⁵⁵

The wealth of this period was built on the backs of enslaved Africans — by one estimate, 80 per cent of the value of export commodities in the Americas (including the British, Spanish, French and Portuguese colonies) was generated by African labour.⁵⁶

The Slave Trade Abolition Act in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1834 brought a formal end to slavery in the British Caribbean. But the history of exploitation and extraction in Barbados and the other sugar colonies does not end here.

From the mid-19th and into the early 20th century, Barbados’s planter class, enabled by British colonial policy, successfully prevented formal freedom becoming economic emancipation for Black workers on the island. 

The way we tell the story of abolition and its aftermath matters. The struggle for freedom continued long after 1834, and the principal structures of the plantation economy, formed over preceding centuries, proved durable.

Far from being an unalloyed moral triumph for Britain, emancipation and its aftermath was complex and fiercely contested.

In Britain, the emancipation story is usually told as a triumphalist example of white morality, with heroes like William Wilberforce giving the slaves their freedom.

This ignores the agency of enslaved people and the importance of sustained Black resistance which catalysed abolition.

Enslaved rebellions from the earliest decades of colonisation to the eve of emancipation included:

1649: First documented slave rebellion in Barbados.

1791: Start of the Haitian revolution.

1816: Bussa rebellion in Barbados.

1823: Demerara rebellion.

1832: Sam Sharpe rebellion in Jamaica.

Eric Williams has argued that emancipation would have been impossible without the declining political and economic importance of the Caribbean sugar industry within the British empire. Humanitarian arguments only gained purchase thanks to “the defection of the capitalists from the ranks of the slave owners and slave traders.”⁵⁷

Abolition was not a moral turn away from slavery by the capitalist class, but an economic orientation away from the mercantilist system and towards more trade with India, Latin America and Australia, especially as cotton eclipsed sugar as a world-shaping commodity.⁵⁸

That British capitalists' anti-slavery zeal was only ever partial is evident in their continued entanglement with the slave economies in Cuba, Brazil and the southern US, long into the 19th century.

British goods continued to be sent to Africa where they were used by Cuban and Brazilian consignees for purchasing slaves, British bankers financed slave traders and plantation owners, and British firms in 1843 handled three-eighths of the sugar, half of the coffee and five-eighths of the cotton exported from Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.⁵⁹

The emancipation process also involved compensation — but for the slave-owners and not for the enslaved.

The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, the equivalent of 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual income or five per cent of GDP.⁶⁰

In today’s money, £20 million would amount to £2.2 billion. However, some historians argue the more equivalent figure is the relevant share of current GDP, which would be more than £100 billion.⁶¹

Bankers Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore led a syndicate that raised three-quarters of the loan, with the other quarter paid out directly in government stock. The loan was only fully paid off in 2015.⁶²

Tax Justice Network attempted to find further details on the ultimate creditors but were not able to trace them since the loan was bundled up with other government debts.⁶³

As well as individual owners, almost 200 merchant firms in London received compensation. Just under half of these were primarily West India merchants, and the rest were more diversified.  

Although many of these firms ceased to trade over the 19th century, almost 60 were still active in the 1860s and a dozen by the First World War, showing how compensation was, in many cases, reintegrated into Britain’s financial system.⁶⁴

Slave owners also sometimes reinvested their compensation money in Britain, especially in the railways.

This compensation was a small amount of the overall capital invested in the railways, but in some schemes it was significant: ten per cent of the £452,900 raised for the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock and Ayr Railway Company (£44 million in current prices) was from slave owners.⁶⁵

Overall, in their analysis of slave compensation records, historians Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McCelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang conclude that, far from emancipation being a decisive break with the old mercantile order and the start of a new “modern” economy in Britain, many former slave owners were important investors in the construction of this new financial, commercial and industrial world.⁶⁶

In other words, just as slavery underpinned the emergence of British capitalism, compensation paid to slave-owners also helped its evolution. Slavery was not swept away; it left its mark on Britain as much as on the Caribbean.

As well as compensation from the government, planters were given a second form of compensation in 1834: the apprenticeship system, which was effectively free labour from formerly enslaved people on planters’ land.

The Emancipation Act freed all children under the age of six, but adults were required to work for 45 hours a week for their former masters without pay as “apprentices”. During this period, infant mortality rose in Barbados as parents struggled to provide for children whom planters now refused to feed.⁶⁷

The intention was for this to last for six years for field hands and four years for household slaves, but sustained resistance led to the end of all apprenticeships in 1838.

In Barbados, at least some Black workers, now finally emancipated from slavery and the apprenticeship system, expected to receive economic as well as legal freedom.

As reported in The Barbadian newspaper in July 1838, the workers on the Apes Hill plantation had formed the impression that they would be receiving money and a grant of land on emancipation day, as well as possibly living in the “Great Houses” of the estates in future.⁶⁸

The Governor of Barbados visited Apes Hill to disabuse its labourers of this notion of economic redistribution. In fact, in the post-apprenticeship period planters continued ruthlessly to exploit the agricultural workforce, enabled by their control over arable land.

With almost all the land owned by the planter class and used to grow sugar cane, newly emancipated Black labourers had no opportunity to acquire smallholdings.

In 1842, 441 estates controlled 81 per cent of the colony’s 106,000 acres of land.⁶⁹

Unlike in other sugar colonies, Barbados had no Crown lands — unoccupied public lands labourers could use as a “subsistence refuge” to fish, grow good and gather wood.⁷⁰

“Located Labour” laws gave planters additional legal control over their workers, who lived in rented houses on the estate.

For example, they could evict labourers from plantation lands without compensation and even imprison them for supposed infractions at work, and labourers were limited to working on one estate.⁷¹

Though modified occasionally, these laws remained as punitive through to the 20th century. For example, the 1897 Landlord and Tenant Act allowed planters to seize property from tenants as rent payments, a power that planters often used to intimidate their workers.⁷²

The result of planter control over labour was the immiseration of the Black working class. Wages in Barbados after emancipation were the lowest in the Caribbean.

Widespread hunger was evident in the prevalence of “potato raids”, incidents where workers would steal crops from plantation provision grounds in desperation.⁷³

To the imperial government, Black people’s wellbeing mattered far less than coercing their labour and suppressing dissent.

Between 1838 and 1850, 50 to 60 per cent of government expenditure went on law and order and only ten per cent on poor relief.⁷⁴

The extent of planter control over land and labour in Barbados meant that it was the only British Caribbean colony to substantially increase sugar production in the decade after emancipation.⁷⁵

While other colonies, especially the newer colonies of Trinidad and British Guiana, ended up relying on new sources of coerced labour such as indentured workers from India and “liberated Africans” (Africans from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy), Barbados was offered white prison labour and liberated Africans by Britain but declined.⁷⁶

The existing Black workforce was sufficient to support the continuation of the plantation economy.

During the 19th century, the US and Canada also became increasingly important markets for Barbados’s sugar exports, though the trade with Britain remained the most valuable.

However, in the late 19th century, the price of sugar collapsed as Western European countries began subsidising beet sugar production on the continent.⁷⁷

In Barbados, the average price for 100lbs of sugar fell from almost £100 (current prices) in 1882 to £30 in 1902. This was especially devastating when 97 per cent of Barbados’s exports by the turn of the century were sugar products.⁷⁸

Despite the crisis, the plantocracy, with the help of financial institutions like the Barbados Mutual Life Assurance Society, was able to keep the price of land artificially high so workers still had few opportunities to buy smaller plots.⁷⁹

Workers suffered from stagnant and declining wages: there were no wage increases between 1860 and 1895, and wages actually declined after the sugar market collapsed in 1897.⁸⁰

The British imperial response to the crisis was to further entrench the plantocracy. Despite a Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1897 finding compelling evidence that widespread hunger and labour unrest was due to the exclusion of Black people from land-holding and food growing, British politicians resisted the redistribution of land to smallholders.⁸¹

Joseph Chamberlain, who became Secretary of State for the Colonial Office in 1895, was committed to protecting the sugar industry, and successfully pushed for government grants for planters as well as the abolition of subsidies for beet sugar in 1902. 

He cited the £3 million worth of British manufactured goods sent each year to the Caribbean (£321 million in current prices) as evidence of the colonies’ continued economic benefit.⁸²

At the dawn of the 20th century, with the sugar industry in crisis, conditions for workers remained dire. Public health inspectors at the time noted that the infant death rate in some parts of Barbados was as much as three times higher than in England and Wales.⁸³

Meanwhile, the sugar industry in Barbados was notably less modernised than in other parts of the Caribbean where labour was scarcer.

By 1911, two-thirds of the 329 plantations in Barbados relied on wind power rather than steam.⁸⁴

In contrast, large swathes of the region, especially in the Greater Antilles and Central America, had been transformed by American capital, which financed the creation of enormous sugar and banana plantations and centralised steam milling.⁸⁵

The United States was also involved in a new project to build the Panama Canal, offering wages at least double that which workers could earn on sugar estates in Barbados. This presented new opportunities for migration.

Ever since emancipation, migration had been an opportunity for some Black workers (mainly skilled male workers, such as coopers, masons and carpenters) to travel overseas and seek higher wages. 

Between 1868 and 1875, Barbadians in British Guiana sent home 5,654 postal orders (similar to cheques but not tied to a bank account) totalling almost £946,000 in current prices.⁸⁶

In 1905, the Americans set up their main labour recruiting station for the Panama Canal in Barbados.

20,000 Barbadians travelled to the canal zone over the following decade, with around 25,000 more men and women travelling informally and paying their own passage, out of a total population of less than 200,000.⁸⁷ 

Of these 45,000 Barbadians, 5,893 are recorded as dying, likely due to explosions, landslides and other accidents, as well as disease, mainly pneumonia and malaria. The death toll may have been as high as 7,000.⁸⁸

Between 1906 and 1920, Barbadian workers in Panama sent postal remittances totally almost £55 million (current prices) back to Barbados.⁸⁹

The influx of “Panama money” to Barbados shaped the island’s economy. Not all returners from the Canal Zone had money saved, but if they did, they would use it to purchase land or shops, build new chattel houses, or put into savings accounts.⁹⁰

As a result, new financial institutions serving the Black community flourished, including “friendly societies” where workers could make a weekly contribution and be guaranteed sick and death benefits in exchange.

110 new friendly societies were established between 1907 and 1910. But the 1905 Friendly Societies Act made it illegal for individual societies to hold land of more than one acre, limiting their ability to translate capital into land holding.⁹¹

Despite these restrictions, there was a growth in the number of smallholders, from an estimated 8,500 in 1897...

 ... to 13,152 in 1912...

... to 15,000 in 1917 and ...

... 17,731 in 1929.

However, a lot of these land plots were sold by plantation owners who parcelled up the hilly, dry, infertile parts of their sugar cane estates. This meant that the planter class was the ultimate beneficiary of some of the Panama money.⁹²

As smallholders mostly used newly acquired land to grow sugar cane, there was even less acreage given over to growing provisions, increasing food pressures.⁹³ The increase of money circulated on the island also contributed to food price inflation.

As the aftermath of Panama migration changed workers’ economic conditions and expectations, the sugar industry was also changing.

Like much of the imperial world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Caribbean was transformed by the emergence of monopoly corporations, American and British, with companies like Tate and Lyle, Bookers and United Fruit dominating the sugar and banana economies of Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, British Guiana and Central America.⁹⁴

Corporate consolidation also took place within the sugar industry in Barbados, but this was unusual in being driven by the white settler elite rather than international firms.

The planter class established the Plantations Company Limited in 1917 as a way to increase the size of capital funds available to the sector. The Company also acted as a vehicle to purchase bankrupt estates and preserve control over land ownership. In turn, the merchant class founded the Barbados Shipping and Trading Company Limited in 1920, amalgamating the six largest commercial companies on the island.⁹⁵

By 1934, these two rival companies merged into the monopolistic Barbados Produce Exporters Association, giving the white elite monopoly control over production and the entire network of import-export distribution, power unchecked by the presence of labour unions or meaningful government regulation of working conditions or wages.⁹⁶

The planter class also underwent a process of modernisation. Between 1911 and 1921, 66 less efficient mills closed, and 19 modern sugar factories, catering to a far larger acreage of sugar cane, were built.⁹⁷ 

The advent of central sugar milling in modern factories, meant the loss of a whole range of specialised jobs for carpenters, boilers, blacksmiths, carters and wheelwrights, and also reduced opportunities for odd-jobs for estate workers in milling between harvests.⁹⁸

Consolidation and modernisation in the plantation sector upended traditional planter-worker relations which, while far from harmonious, were more individualistic, and often paternalistic, giving labourers limited room to negotiate certain accommodations.⁹⁹

This, coupled with dislocations from mill closures and food price inflation put unbearable strain on workers, just at the time when the influx of Panama money had opened up new horizons for Black people in Barbados.

Where planters still wanted to enforce old economic norms, including paying low wages and tying workers to particular estates, this was bound to come into conflict with workers’ new expectations.¹⁰⁰

The stage was also set for confrontation by the experiences of the First World War and the Great Depression.

Despite a boom in the plantation economy during the First World War, Black workers saw little benefit, and were disproportionately affected by inflation, which reached 145 per cent for some essentials.¹⁰¹

The War also fuelled Black nationalist sentiments. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914 by Jamaican Marcus Garvey, drew support because of the racist treatment of Black soldiers from the Caribbean who enlisted, as well as pressing the argument that the War, fought for the “the sacred principle of democracy”, made self-determination for Africa and Caribbean more pressing.¹⁰²

The Great Depression deepened the economic crisis in Barbados, with sugar prices collapsing and planters increasingly forced to borrow from the Sugar Industry Industrial Bank to keep operating.¹⁰³

It was workers who bore the brunt of sharp price increases due to the reduction in trade in goods from the US. From the end of 1936 to the middle of 1937, one observer stated that inflation was so high that workers had in effect seen a 25 per cent reduction in their pay.¹⁰⁴

As a result, Barbados saw a major workers’ rebellion in 1937. This should be placed in the context of anti-colonial workers’ resistance in the Caribbean across the 1930s, which put pressure on the British government to act on the miserable conditions in which most Black people continued to live and work, their labour ruthlessly exploited by monopoly corporations, whether local (in Barbados’s case) or international (in the wider Caribbean).

By the outbreak of the Second World War, although formal slavery had ended more than a hundred years before, labour relations in the plantation economy had, in many ways, not radically altered, especially in Barbados where the planter class consolidated power over the workforce via control of land. 

Workers exercised what agency they could, whether through resistance to the apprenticeship system, potato raids to appropriate the resources to stave off starvation, or migration in search of higher wages, culminating in the organised rebellion of 1937. Nevertheless, they continued to feel most acutely the effects of the sugar industry’s crisis of profitability from the late 19th century onwards.

Black people in Barbados, just as in the centuries of slavery, continued to see little to none of the profits of the sugar industry that rested on their labour.

At the start of the 20th century, Barbados was a British colony with an economy almost entirely dependent on sugar. By the century’s close, it was an independent state whose primary generator of foreign exchange was tourism.

These significant political and economic changes should not obscure the fact that Barbados, like much of the Caribbean, remains subject to forms of foreign ownership and control.

Decolonisation was not a decisive break with the past but an evolution of the nature of extractive capitalism in the region. 

Following the labour resistance of the 1930s, it was clear that the economic situation in the Caribbean was untenable. From the last decades of imperial rule to the first decades of independence, different models of “development” were proposed with different diagnoses of Barbados’s challenges, from colonial development plans to support the sugar industry to post-independence plans to use foreign capital to diversify into other sectors.

But whether neo-mercantilist or neoliberal in outlook, these development models failed to offer genuine economic freedom to accompany political freedom.

In the late 1930s, the British government sent the Moyne Commission to investigate the economic conditions of the Caribbean sugar colonies.

In accepting that the poverty and structural underdevelopment of the Caribbean was no longer tenable, the Moyne Commission reflected a reorientation in British colonial policy in the early 20th century towards “responsible trusteeship”, with a greater focus on social welfare.¹⁰⁵

However, this was arguably a smokescreen for an underpinning economic philosophy to empire that remained similar to the preceding centuries. Britain was interested in “developing” the colonies to ensure they remained good markets for British products, especially in the context of the depressed conditions facing British industry after World War II.¹⁰⁶

For that reason, Britain was uninterested in any structural transformation of the plantation economies which would entail a move away from sugar and potentially reduce dependence on British exports.¹⁰⁷

The Moyne Commission misdiagnosed the problem of poverty in the region as one of “overpopulation” rather than overreliance on a failing sugar industry.

This misdiagnosis carried through into the British government’s first colonial development plan for Barbados (1946-55), which kept Barbados dependent on sugar monoculture.¹⁰⁸

With economic opportunities still limited, the “push” factors for Windrush-generation migration from Barbados and other sugar colonies after 1948 should not be discounted, even as “pull” factors including British recruitment drives to fill post-war labour shortages also shaped this movement of people.

Moving towards self-government, Barbados joined the West Indies Federation in 1958 — an attempted political union of multiple British Caribbean territories including Trinidad and Jamaica. The Federation remained part of the Empire but was intended as a way to transition towards independence as a single state.

The Federation was dissolved in 1962, and Barbados became independent in 1966.

During the decolonisation process, some Caribbean voices called for a reparative transfer of economic wealth as well as political power.

St Lucian economist Arthur Lewis, who would go on to receive the Nobel prize, argued in his 1938 pamphlet “Labour in the West Indies” for what Hilary Beckles calls a “reparations development approach.”¹⁰⁹

Based on the fact that Britain owed a debt to the Caribbean due to their exploitation of enslaved people, Lewis called for substantial low-interest development loans and free-grants as reparations financing to transform the economies of the West Indies and alleviate local poverty.¹¹⁰

There were even some within the British government who recognised the moral claim of the Caribbean to reparations due to Britain’s ongoing exploitation of the region and its failure to support an economic transition away from the plantation system.

While we may deride the claim that Britain owes a debt to the West Indies for the fortunes taken out of them in the plantation days, the fact remains that until quite recently nothing was done to put money back into these islands in order to expand their economy, and that the effects of this neglect are now being felt.

Stephen Luke, assistant undersecretary of state with superintending responsibility for the West Indies, 1952.¹¹¹

However, in negotiations, first with the West Indies Federation and subsequently with individual colonies, the British government refused this reparation finance approach to transferring any significant wealth back to the Caribbean as nations gained independence. Poverty, poor public health, limited education and public infrastructure all became problems of “development” for new governments, rather than a legacy of British imperial rule.¹¹²

Political freedom, hard-won through anticolonial struggle, was rightly celebrated across the Caribbean. But economic freedom meant confronting constrained choices in a world economic system still structured around the exploitation of certain areas for the benefit of metropolitan zones.

US anti-communist hegemony loomed large over the Caribbean, during decolonisation and beyond, with Britain playing an active role in promoting America’s interests, even as formal empire came to an end.

So far as purely British interests are concerned, this might not greatly matter. We have no great commercial or defence interests in these islands any longer, and the ties that we have with them are largely cultural, moral and sentimental. Our principal ally, the United States, is, however, very sensitive about anything that happens in these territories and would not welcome a situation developing in which Britain withdrew and left seven potential little Haitis or Cubas on their door step.

Hilton Poynton, permanent under-secretary of state for the colonies, 1965.¹¹³

Despite this pressure, some Caribbean nations did experiment with alternative, non-capitalist development pathways, including state ownership of strategic industries and closer relations with communist countries.

Under Forbes Burnham and the People’s National Congress (PNC) Party, Guyana pursued “cooperative socialism”. 

The PNC government nationalised the bauxite industry in 1972 and the sugar industry in 1976 (90 per cent of which was owned by Booker McConnell Ltd.).¹¹⁴

However, corruption and the deterioration of public services, along with rising inflation and unemployment, undermined the economic project, which ended in an IMF structural adjustment programme after Burnham’s death in 1985.

Michael Manley’s “democratic socialism” in Jamaica, focused on participatory democracy and creating a mixed economy with major sectors under state control.

A production levy of 7.5 per cent was introduced for the foreign bauxite companies, replacing a previous regime much more favourable to them.¹¹⁵

Despite CIA efforts to undermine Manley, who was willing to build closer ties with communist Cuba, he was re-elected in a landslide in 1976.

However, in 1977, Manley was forced to accept an IMF loan and implement structural adjustment, including anti-labour measures and cuts to public spending. In 1980, the opposition Jamaica Labor Party defeated Manley in a landslide.

“We are not in anybody’s backyard, and we are definitely not for sale.”

Maurice Bishop in 1979, one month after taking power in Grenada’s New Jewel Movement revolution.¹¹⁶

In Grenada, Maurica Bishop led the People’s Revolutionary Government. Their programme focused on developing the infrastructure for a locally owned tourism industry, improving standards of living and upgrading social services, and diversifying overseas trade and aid by pursuing links with socialist states, including Cuba.

Following a military coup and the assassination of Maurice Bishop, the US invaded and occupied the island, setting it on a more capitalist development path.

Barbados, however, followed the American-favoured development pathway, an adaptation of Arthur Lewis’ “industrialisation by invitation”, whereby foreign capital would be used to move economies away from agricultural specialisation.¹¹⁷

In pursuit of export-oriented growth, Barbados experienced early success in industrial exports which grew by 28 per cent per year from independence until 1980, making it the largest per capita industrial exporter in the Caribbean.¹¹⁸

INTEL, an American firm, opened a new assembly plant for its semiconductors on the island in 1977, and was a major contributor to this export-oriented manufacturing boom.

However, in the mid-1980s, INTEL relocated production to the Dominican Republic where wages were lower. The government of Barbados, by ensuring wages rose with consumer price inflation throughout the 1970s and 1980s, undermined its attractiveness as a manufacturing centre for US firms.¹¹⁹

The INTEL experience reflected the challenge for Barbados’s economy post-independence, a challenge shared by new nations across the world in the shadow of Empire.

Encouraged to be as open as possible to foreign capital, they had to contend with the mobility of that capital, which could at any moment retreat to other locations offering cheaper labour, lower taxes or fewer regulations.¹²⁰

Like many post-independence Caribbean states, Barbados used foreign borrowing to finance public sector spending.

Some of this spending was to improve the social welfare of populations still scarred by empire.¹²¹ Some was to invest in the economic infrastructure to support new industries including tourism, as with the major capital projects to construct a deep-water harbour in Bridgetown in 1957 and make improvements to the international airport in 1958.

The oil shocks of the 1970s also led to increased borrowing, with public spending used to try and maintain employment in manufacturing and tourism during the crises, as oil prices rises led to inflation and additional pressure on the islands’ balance of payments.¹²²

As a result, Barbados sought IMF support. In the 1990s, a structural adjustment programme involved an eight per cent cut in public sector wages and a shrinking of the size of the state, though the government resisted IMF demands for a devaluation of the Barbadian dollar.¹²³

Debt was, therefore, a mechanism for incorporating Barbados, and many other parts of the Caribbean, into a neoliberal world order, characterised by openness to capital and constraints on the strategic role of the state in the economy. Since the 1980s, Barbados has defaulted on and restructured its IMF debt three times.

In 2022, Barbados’s public debt was estimated to be 13.5 billion USD, representing 130 per cent of GDP, the third-highest per capita in the world.¹²⁴

Barbados’s debt crises and structural adjustment programmes were concurrent with the shift of the US from aid to trade partner in the late 20th century. In 1985, during the Cold War, the US sent 677 million USD (current prices) to the Caribbean as part of its anti-communist strategy.¹²⁵

By 1996, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this had fallen to 45 million USD.¹²⁶

At the same time, trade agreements like the Caribbean Basin Initiative, first proposed by Reagan in 1982, shaped economic relations in the US’s favour by excluding some of the Caribbean’s most competitive exports (including sugar and textiles) and incentivising the use of US source materials in manufacturing.¹²⁷

As a result, the US’s trade surplus with the Caribbean grew, and, for Barbados, continues to be large to this day.

Ever more integrated into the neoliberal world economy, tourism soon emerged as Barbados’s primary generator of foreign exchange.

The rise of tourism has created new metropole/periphery dynamics of economic dependence, and, like the sugar plantations before it, has often wrought ecological damage to the very natural resources on which it depends.

Across the world, the tourism industry tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of large multinational players. In Barbados, this has shaped the ownership patterns of the hotels and cruise ships through which tourists experience the island.¹²⁸

Although the Hilton Hotel, built in 1966, was financed and remains to this day majority-owned by the government and managed by Hilton Hotels Ltd., other tourist construction in the 1960s and 1970s was driven by the private sector.

Early legislation like the Hotel Aids Act of 1967 incentivised the construction of large hotels, which excluded many locals from ownership.¹²⁹

Where local participation occurred, this often came from the white settler elite; the Barbados Shipping and Trading Company Ltd., for example, had significant holdings in real estate and tourism.¹³⁰

By 1979, a Ministry of Tourism survey found that 55 per cent of all hotel beds in Barbados were foreign-owned, rising to 74 per cent of luxury hotel beds.¹³¹

In recent years, there has been a further shift towards branded hotels, with the Wyndham Grand opening in 2023, Hotel Indigo Barbados by IHG opening in 2024, and Pendry Barbados and Hyatt Ziva Barbados both under construction.¹³²

Meanwhile, in the cruise industry, the top three companies (Carnival Cruises, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Holiday Cruises) controlled between 75 and 90 per cent of the global market for the period 2015 to 2021.¹³³

The dominance of large multinational firms in the tourism industry leads to leakages — where money generated by tourist spending is ultimately lost to the economies of other countries.

In the Caribbean, recent estimates are that for every dollar spent, 80 cents will wind up overseas.¹³⁴

Some of these leakages come from the fact that Barbados has offered significant tax breaks to tourism firms. This has been a feature of the industry from the beginning: the Hotel Aids Act of 1967 used ten-year tax exemptions on profits to incentivise the construction of new hotels.

In 2013, Jamaican-owned hotel chain Sandals Resort International was offered generous tax breaks for opening a new site in Barbados, a move which was criticised by local hoteliers as unfair.¹³⁵

Large cruise lines have been able to successfully negotiate extremely low port charges across the Caribbean, thanks to their ability to withdraw ships and dock at other ports at short notice.¹³⁶

The largest cruise companies are also incorporated in low tax jurisdictions to protect their profits. Royal Caribbean, which has a market value of 37 billion USD, with the Caribbean accounting for 55 per cent of its passenger capacity,¹³⁷ is incorporated in Liberia, an arrangement that not only allows it to avoid tax but also stricter labour laws and environmental regulations.¹³⁸

Leakages are also exacerbated by the amount of tourist spending that goes directly to multinational firms, rather than being spent within the local economy.

All-inclusive resorts, common across the Caribbean, mean little money is spent outside hotels by stayover tourists.¹³⁹ And cruise liners have been making recent efforts to buy or lease land in the Caribbean for private beaches and clubs, limiting contact between cruise passengers and locals during stops.¹⁴⁰

Cruises have also focused on maximising their on-board revenues by offering spas, restaurants, casinos and other experiences that substitute for spending in ports. Those that do go ashore often do so through “approved” vendors, with cruise liners charging a fee to be featured in these promotions.¹⁴¹

Finally, leakages happen because Barbados remains dependent on imports, including of food, which comes mainly from the United States.¹⁴²

The tourist industry’s electricity consumption also depends on imported petroleum to generate.¹⁴³

Given the extractive structure of the tourist industry, it is unsurprising that, even as the number tourist arrivals has grown across the 21st century, this has not always translated into sustainable economic gains for the people of the Caribbean.

Since the 2000s, economic growth in the region has stagnated, and many islands show telltale signs of “overtourism”, as the industry has been underregulated and success measured in terms of short-term metrics like tourist numbers or industry profits, rather than considering any of the longer term social and environmental challenges.¹⁴⁴

In Barbados, growing numbers of tourist arrivals have not led, in real terms, to an increase in overall tourist spending. In 2008, 1.2 million visitors spent 1.8 billion USD (current prices), but in 2019, 1.4 million visitors spent only 1.58 billion USD.¹⁴⁵

And while economic returns are diminishing, tourism continues, like the sugar industry before it, to wreak ecological havoc on the region.

Cruise ships are particularly harmful. The Caribbean accounts for 50 per cent of the global market share of cruises,¹⁴⁶ with 90 per cent of cruise passengers in the region coming from the US.¹⁴⁷

Cruise ships generate vast amounts of waste, polluting marine environments. One study found that when a cruise ship drops anchors in a coral reef for a day, this impacts an area about half the size of an American football field, most of which dies.¹⁴⁸

Barbados has recorded mass coral bleaching events in 2005 (where an average of 71 per cent of corals were bleached resulting in a loss of 26 per cent of live coral cover) and 2010 (where an average of 37 per cent of corals were bleached resulting in a loss of eight per cent of live coral cover).¹⁴⁹

The damage done to the Caribbean’s marine and coastal resources by overtourism is particularly concerning when these are so vital to the region’s economies and ecosystems.

50 per cent of all livelihoods in the Caribbean are sustained by these resources. The region is home to over 12,000 fish and other marine species, ten per cent of the world’s coral reefs and 12 per cent of the world’s mangroves, all of which are threatened by environmental degradation.¹⁵⁰

The tourism industry is, of course, not the only force doing ecological damage in the Caribbean. The region is at the sharp edge of the climate crisis, despite contributing less than 0.3 per cent to historical global emissions.¹⁵¹

It is the second most hazard-prone region in the world. Caribbean countries are seven times more likely to be hit by natural disasters than larger states and twice as likely as other small states.¹⁵²

Between 2000 and 2023, the Caribbean experienced 793 climactic events, mainly storms and floods, causing over 200 USD billion worth of damages.¹⁵³

But rather than resources flowing into the region to improve its climate resilience, money continues to flow out of the Caribbean as payments to creditors (mainly the IMF and the World Bank), thanks to the imperial and neoliberal legacies of high levels of sovereign debt.

Analysis by the Climate and Community Institute found that for most Caribbean countries, including Barbados, the annual cost of external debt service was equal to or exceeded the UN’s projected estimates of the annual cost of climate action for that nation.¹⁵⁴

The Caribbean, like much of the Global South, has increasingly had to rely on private finance for climate adaptation and mitigation projects. This shift away from overseas development aid and public finance has created, in political economist Keston Perry’s words, new forms of “bond-age” as Caribbean nations take on further debt.¹⁵⁵

Within this paradigm, climate projects are pursued based on potential profits, not need. Investments in mitigation, such as renewable energy, have proved more attractive to private capital than adaptation projects like flood defences,¹⁵⁶ with adaptation finance averaging only five per cent of worldwide climate finance flows.¹⁵⁷

Barbados has been at the forefront of calling for a different approach to climate finance. Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s government proposed the Bridgetown Initiative in 2022, an effort to push international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank into facilitating greater access to emergency funding for climate disasters and finance for climate resilience and adaptation.

In 2024, Bridgetown 3.0 also proposed new international taxes on wealth, aviation and fossil fuel companies in service of climate funding, as well as pushing for natural disaster clauses for sovereign debt.¹⁵⁸

The Bridgetown Initiative is a good starting point for reform, but further transformations would be needed to reduce dependence on the Global North and private finance. For example, new public, democratic financial institutions based in the Global South would diversify funding steams for adaptation and mitigation projects.¹⁵⁹

Climate finance debates have so far tended to marginalise the issue of reparations for the loss and damages caused by historic and ongoing climate disasters, because the largest past and present emitters like the US and Europe have been reluctant to take accountability.¹⁶⁰

A more reparative approach would reflect the reality that the history of empire was one of ecological devastation and left many countries without the resources to repair these harms.¹⁶¹

The climate crisis is a stark reminder that, even more than half a century after decolonisation, the fates of post-imperial states remain entangled with the economies of the Global North.

Barbados is the 15th most water-scarce nation in the world, with rising sea levels threatening to contaminate aquifers, and rainfall due to drop by as much as 40 per cent by the end of this century.¹⁶²

Its sugar cane wealth, built on the backs of enslaved Africans, profoundly shaped the British economy in the era of industrialisation; the emissions produced by industrial capitalism, then and since, now threaten the island’s future.

Barbados, like much of the Caribbean and many countries formerly colonised by the West across the world, may no longer be subject to formal imperialism but nevertheless exists in an economic system still shaped by colonial dynamics. Its economy remains structured around an industry highly vulnerable to external factors and where much of the wealth generated ends up in foreign hands, with economic freedom further constrained by high levels of debt, exacerbated by the climate crisis.

The effects of empire are not just a past but an ongoing injustice. This has, for centuries, spurred scholars and activists to demand reparations from Britain. Often framed in contemporary discourse as unprecedented and impractical, reparations are a standard tool of international justice.¹⁶³ Previous examples include reparations paid by the German government for the genocide against the Herero and Nama in Namibia and by the Canadian federal government to survivors of the Indian Residential Schools programme.

Demands for Caribbean reparations have deep roots in the struggle of enslaved Africans, who recognised through their resistance the injustice of their position. In Britain, formerly enslaved abolitionist Ottobah Cugoana wrote in 1791 of the importance of “adequate reparation” for the harms done to enslaved people.¹⁶⁴

The Pan-African Conferences, including those held in London in 1900 and in Manchester in 1945, provided an internationalist foundation for reparations struggles in the UK.¹⁶⁵

In recent years, these struggles have been led by campaigns, community groups, movements and networks including the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament, the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, and the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations.¹⁶⁶

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the demands for reparations ran through from resistance by recently emancipated workers seeking access to land to the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey.¹⁶⁷

In 2013, Caribbean governments joined with civil society in pushing for a dialogue around reparations and formed the Caricom Reparations Commission.¹⁶⁸

Just as empire and slavery had wide-ranging impacts on the economies and societies of the Caribbean, Britain and much of the world, so calls for reparative justice reflect the need for a holistic approach to repair. Caricom’s ten point plan includes the need for a full apology, for debt cancellation, for reconnection with African forms of knowledge systematically destroyed by enslavement, and public health and education programmes.¹⁶⁹

In Britain, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations, formed in 2021, is calling for a Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice, offering affected communities self-determination in shaping the way forward.¹⁷⁰

From emancipation to decolonisation and beyond, the British government has, at critical junctures, refused to countenance the reparations discussion. Though Britain was the architect and beneficiary of the economic system empire created to funnel wealth from periphery to core and exploit the environments and peoples of rest of the world, this same system now harms all of us.

Empire gave corporations borderless access to wealth and the ability to extract it regardless of the consequences for human beings. We can’t possible expect this to stay “over there”.

For example, Barbados loses the equivalent of 674 USD per person to global tax abuse every year, akin to 68 per cent of its education budget.¹⁷¹ Britain loses 672 USD per person, or the equivalent of 30 per cent of its education budget.¹⁷² 

We are all made poorer for as long as the lack of corporate accountability enabled by extractive capitalism prevails.