This book has had a long gestation period. The final phase began in 2007, after I retired as Director of Chatham House. However, its intellectual origins go back to 1998, when I retired as Director of the University of London's Institute of Latin American Studies. This was when I started a research project with other scholars on the causes of the wide spread of income per head between Caribbean countries in the twentieth century. That research project resulted in a first attempt at a database covering the whole Caribbean and led to a special issue of the journal Integration & Trade (September 2001). However, the research stopped as soon as I became Director of Chatham House.

Yet, in a very real sense, the origins of this book can be traced to 1966–7 when I was a secondary school teacher in Belize (at that time called British Honduras). This was my first exposure to the Caribbean, and it gave me a lifelong interest in the region even though I spent the first decades of my academic career as a specialist on Latin America. After writing economic histories of Central America (The Political Economy of Central America since 1920) and of Latin America (The Economic History of Latin America since Independence), it seemed only natural to turn my hand to an economic history of the Caribbean.