West Indian Business History: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship ed. by B.W.Higman and Kathleen E.A., and: A History of Money and Banking in Barbados, 1627–1973 by Eric Armstrong (review)

Business and banking history are relatively underdeveloped fields within the English-speaking Caribbean and many of the books published on particular business and banking institutions are of dubious merit. A good number of these monographs are little more than vanity publications issued to commemorate a marketing milestone or a corporate birthday. Often, these texts are lavishly illustrated, expensively bound, and, given their privileged access to archives, well sourced. Generally published to serve an audience of shareholders and staff members, they are rarely critical. Similarly, histories of foreign business and banking institutions operating in the West Indies often have the veneer of academic legitimacy (established scholars are commissioned to write them, reputable university presses are enlisted to publish them) but their authors are constrained by the needs of their patrons and the histories they recount are often deployed for the strategic aims of the institution. With little work to constitute a scholarly tradition of business and banking history in the English-speaking Caribbean, it is no wonder that two recent texts—West Indian Business History: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, edited by historians Barry Higman and Kathleen E.A. Monteith, and A History of Money and Banking in Barbados, 1627–1973, authored by economist Eric Armstrong—both begin by noting that the field is neglected. Both works are attempts at redressing this neglect and developing a tradition of scholarship on Caribbean business and banking history.

West Indian Business History is a collection of ten essays, most of them reprinted from historical journals, bookended by a concise introductory chapter by Higman and Monteith and a useful bibliography for further reading. In the introductory chapter, the editors stake a claim for the development of business history as a distinct historical subfield within the Anglophone Caribbean, outline its origins, and provide an overview of its approaches and concerns. They acknowledge the overlaps between business history and economic, political and social history but distinguish it from the applied investigations of management and entrepreneurialism of “business studies,” popular amongst students at the University of the West Indies, and from labor history, which has had, they note, a cantankerous and querulous relation with business history.

In part, the vexed association of business history with labor history emerges from the genealogy of business history itself. As a discipline, business history first emerged from Harvard’s Center for Research and Entrepreneurial History, founded in 1948 to defend the activities of “big business and financial capitalism” (p. 1). While the editors offer no conjectures concerning whether or not that defensive imperative has persisted, its ideological imprint has certainly remained in business history’s normalization of the market as part of its work-a-day concerns. Higman and Monteith note that at its heart, business history centers business enterprises, no matter the size or scale, and analyzes its historical formations, its role in production, distribution, and exchange, its managerial systems and organization, and its relation to the state and society at large. They favorably cite the work of Harvard business historian Alfred Chandler—their chapter’s subtitle, “Scale and Scope,” draws from a Chandlerian vocabulary—arguing his approach to the managerial transformations of United States business, though rarely applied in the West Indies, offers a generative theoretical model for analyzing Caribbean business history. In a somewhat perfunctory fashion, they also suggest that the “plantation economy” model pioneered by Lloyd Best and George Beckford contains an autochthonous tradition of West Indian business history, one that comes closest in approach to the work of Chandler.

Higman and Monteith also identify an archival paradox at the heart of business history. In business, failure is more common than success but it is those businesses...