The reparations campaign rests on a central claim: that Caribbean underdevelopment is the direct and primary consequence of slavery and British colonialism. If that claim is true, it should apply consistently across the Caribbean. Nations that shared the same colonial experience should show broadly similar outcomes.
They do not. And nowhere is the gap more instructive than between the two islands whose governments have led the reparations campaign most vocally.
Barbados and Jamaica were both British colonies. Both were plantation economies built on enslaved African labour. Both were administered under the same colonial system, subject to the same laws, governed by the same Crown. Both gained independence within four years of each other, Jamaica in 1962 and Barbados in 1966. Both inherited the same colonial legacy that the reparations campaign says explains Caribbean poverty today.
Sixty years later, they are very different places.
The development gap
Barbados consistently ranks among the most developed nations in the Caribbean and, by global standards, punches well above its weight for a small island nation. Its Human Development Index score typically places it in the top 60 to 70 countries globally, ahead of many larger and better-resourced nations. Literacy is near universal. Life expectancy is high. The healthcare system functions. Corruption, while present, is relatively low by Caribbean standards. Democratic institutions are stable. The economy, based primarily on tourism and financial services, is small and vulnerable to external shocks but generally competently managed.
Jamaica’s picture is considerably darker. Its Human Development Index score is substantially lower than Barbados. Literacy and educational outcomes lag. Poverty is widespread outside the tourist corridors. The economy has been constrained by debt for decades, with government debt reaching over 140 percent of GDP at its peak. Fiscal adjustment has been painful and prolonged. Jamaica has required repeated IMF interventions.
Most starkly, Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the world, consistently running at around 40 to 50 homicides per 100,000 people annually. Barbados, a few hundred miles away, has a murder rate that is a fraction of that. Both are Caribbean islands with similar demographics, similar histories, and similar colonial legacies. The difference in violence levels is not explained by anything that happened before 1962. It is explained by what happened after.
The political economy of Jamaican violence
Jamaica’s murder rate is not random. It reflects a specific political economy in which armed gangs, known locally as dons, have deep roots in the political system. The practice of politicians using gangs to deliver votes and suppress opposition, and in return providing protection and patronage to gang leaders, developed in the post-independence decades. It has produced communities in which the state has limited authority, where disputes are settled outside the law, and where young men face a choice between poverty and criminal violence with few alternatives in between.
This is not a legacy of slavery. It is a legacy of post-independence political choices. The garrison communities of Kingston, where gang power is most entrenched, were created by housing policies and political strategies pursued by Jamaican governments in the 1960s and 1970s. The politicians who made those choices were Jamaican. The consequences have been borne by Jamaican people for sixty years.
Barbados made different choices. Its political class, whatever its failings, did not build its power on gang patronage. Its institutions, however imperfect, maintained sufficient authority to prevent the capture of communities by criminal networks. The difference is governance, not history.
The Barbados republic moment
In November 2021, Barbados became a republic, removing the British monarch as head of state. The ceremony was widely covered internationally and framed in many quarters as a decisive break with the colonial past. Prime Minister Mia Mottley gave a powerful speech about Caribbean sovereignty and self-determination.
What the coverage rarely noted was that Barbados was already outperforming Jamaica, and most of the rest of the Caribbean, by every development measure before the republic moment. The colonial legacy had apparently not prevented Barbados from building one of the most successful small-nation development stories in the world while still under the nominal sovereignty of the Crown. The republic transition was a legitimate sovereign choice. But it was not a development intervention.
The argument this makes
The gap between Bridgetown and Kingston is not explained by their colonial histories, which are essentially identical. It is not explained by their natural resources, their geography, or their demographics. It is explained by the political and institutional choices their governments made in the sixty years since independence.
This matters enormously for the reparations argument. CARICOM’s case rests on the claim that Caribbean underdevelopment is the legacy of British slavery and colonialism. But if the colonial legacy were the primary determinant of outcomes, Barbados and Jamaica would look broadly similar. They do not. The gap between them, which has nothing to do with colonialism and everything to do with governance, is the most powerful single argument against the colonial-legacy explanation of Caribbean poverty.
Ironically, it is Barbados, the more successful of the two, that has provided the intellectual leadership of the reparations campaign through Sir Hilary Beckles and the University of the West Indies. And it is Jamaica, whose own governance record provides the strongest evidence against the colonial-legacy argument, that has been the loudest political voice demanding that Britain pay.
The tale of two cities does not end with a comfortable moral. It ends with the observation that the people making the strongest case that history determines outcomes are leading a country whose own history, since independence, tells a very different story.
