Colonial Governance and Resource Allocation in the British West Indies (1838–1938)

Luisito Bertinelli, Fabio Fabio Gatti and Eric Strobl
Additional contact information
Luisito Bertinelli: University of Luxembourg
Fabio Fabio Gatti: University of Bern, Bocconi University
Eric Strobl: University of Bern

No 281, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: Plantation elites continued to dominate local colonial governments in the British West Indies even after the abolition of slavery in 1834, directing public spending towards maintaining public order and protecting their property. As such they resisted any reforms that threatened their power, while the local non-white population, constituting of over 90\% of the colonies’ inhabitants, faced repression, segregation, and limited support. A pivotal shift occurred following the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, which prompted Britain to intervene so that by the 1870s most of the West Indian Assemblies were abolished, and the Colonial Office in London assumed direct control of colonial governance. This paper investigates how this shift from the Old Representative System to Crown Colony rule affected government resource allocation. Using public finance data from 16 British West Indian colonies between 1838 and 1938 we demonstrate that the governance reforms led to a significant reallocation of public expenditure towards welfare spending, as well as infrastructure and agricultural development. Our findings contribute to the economic history of colonial governance by revealing how Britain’s political intervention fostered expenditures not necessarily in the interests of the planter oligarchy, thereby promoting a broader modernization of British West Indian economies.

Keywords: Economic History; Colonialism; Political Economics; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 H5 N00 N3 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ehes.org/wp/EHES_281.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hes:wpaper:0281

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Sharp ().