The comparison between Caribbean nations and other post-colonial success stories illuminates what the reparations campaign’s narrative obscures: that the colonial legacy, while real, is not destiny.
South Korea in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, had a GDP per capita lower than Ghana. It had been devastated by war, had almost no natural resources, and had experienced decades of brutal Japanese colonial rule that had deliberately suppressed Korean industrial and technological development. Today, South Korea is a major industrial economy with a higher per capita income than several Western European nations. That transformation was achieved in approximately the same sixty-year period during which the Caribbean has struggled.
Singapore in 1965, when it was separated from Malaysia and became independent, was a malarial island with no natural resources, a fragile economy, and significant ethnic tensions. Lee Kuan Yew himself said at the time that he did not know if Singapore would survive. Today it has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Again, a sixty-year transformation.
Botswana gained independence from Britain in 1966, one of the poorest countries in the world, landlocked, with almost no infrastructure. It subsequently discovered diamonds and, crucially, built institutions capable of managing that wealth for broad national benefit. It is now a middle-income country with a record of democratic stability unusual in sub-Saharan Africa. The colonial legacy was real. It was not the whole story.
