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ABSTRACT
Within the English-speaking Caribbean, Lewis has been associated with industrialization policies pursued therefrom the late 1940s and which have been identified with his advocacy that overpopulated countries find alternatives to agricultural production. Lewis was often dismissed as the author of a failed "industrialization by invitation" policy (a term which was not his creation). This along with the notion of the "Lewis Model" has promoted the view that Lewis provided a narrowly economistic analysis. I have previously challenged the coincidence drawn between Lewis's proposals for economic development in the Caribbean and the policies pursued within the sub-region along with the view that industrialization was his prime concern. Here I further challenge mistaken views of Lewis by exploring his social analysis drawing on a wider range of his work including his Theory of Economic Growth and comment on his continued relevance within the contemporary conjuncture faced by "Tropical" economies.
Starting in 1935 W. Arthur Lewis produced more than one hundred books, monographs, pamphlets, articles and official papers covering a wide range of topics.1 Despite this, for many years he has been widely known internationally in reference to the "Lewis Model" and within the English-speaking Caribbean as the intellectual author of a failed policy of "Industrialization by Invitation". In a recent article I have sought to demonstrate how the "Lewis Model" (which is a construct that was developed by and popularized by other authors) fails to capture Lewis's essential ideas (Figueroa 2004). I have previously shown that, at least in the Jamaican case, the efforts by Caribbean governments to promote industrialization from the late 1940s did not proceed along the lines proposed by Lewis and were part of a general global trend rather than the result of his specific advocacy (Figueroa 1993).
Internationally, Lewis's best known work was his 1954 article on "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour". This was one of the inspirations for the work of Ranis and Fei that led to the notion of the "Lewis Model".2 The presentations by Ranis and Fei and subsequent popularizations in development economics texts such as Todaro (2000), is concerned with a set of issues somewhat different from Lewis's central preoccupations. In addition, by adopting a more narrowly focused techno-économie model using neoclassical methods, these authors...
