Lewis, Arthur

January 23, 1915
June 15, 1991

Sir Arthur Lewis had a notable career as a public intellectual in the field of development economics, and in the process broke through many of the racial barriers that existed in higher education against persons of African descent. For his contributions to the field of development economics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979. In addition to his many academic achievements, he made a mark in public affairs, serving as a frequent consultant to the British Colonial Office during and immediately after World War II. He then became Ghana's first chief economic adviser and, after that, the first vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies. In recognition of his work as the vice-chancellor, Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1963. In the academic world, he held chaired professorships in political economy at the University of Manchester and Princeton University.

Born on the island of St. Lucia in the British West Indies, William Arthur Lewis displayed a brilliance in the classroom that enabled him to win a highly competitive and prestigious West Indian government scholarship to pursue undergraduate studies in Britain. He entered the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1933 to work for a B.A. degree in commerce. After achieving first-class honors in the undergraduate program in 1937, he became a Ph.D. candidate at LSE and completed his thesis in 1940. With war preparations drawing many of the regular LSE faculty away from their teaching and advising responsibilities, the school's administration asked Lewis to become an assistant lecturer in 1938, thus making him LSE's first black faculty member.

Lewis taught at the London School of Economics from 1938 to 1948, introducing the school's first course in what was then called colonial economics, a field that soon was referred to as development economics. After being turned down for a chaired professorship at Liverpool University in 1947 on racial grounds and through the intervention of the vice-chancellor of that institution, Lewis was appointed the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester in 1948. Lewis's professorial appointment at Manchester marked the first time that a black person had held a chair in a British university.

Lewis made his most important scholarly contributions to the emerging field of development economics during his Manchester years (1948–1957). His writings were so influential that many of his peers soon began to describe him as the founding figure of the field. They credited his publications with stimulating broad interest in development economics and providing new perspectives for examining the economies of the less developed parts of the world. Unquestionably, his major work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1979, was an article published in 1954 in the journal Manchester Studies under the title, "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour." In this article Lewis outlined the way that the developed world had first begun to achieve rapid economic growth and suggested that this same process could be repeated in the rest of the world. Central to his argument was a belief that in poor countries a sharp division existed between the traditional and modern economic sectors. In poor economies, a traditional sector housed a large workforce, many of whose members made little or no contribution to the output of that sector. In contrast, in the modern sector labor was highly productive. The key to economic success, then, was to stimulate the modern sector, the economic progress of which was likely to be rapid and successful because workers could easily be drawn out of the traditional sector even at relatively low wages and without any loss of output in the traditional sector. The Lewis model, also known as the dual model, became an instant success. Using its guidelines, economic planners all over the world sought to promote industrial development by attracting workers away from the agricultural sector into the modern, industrializing part of the economy.

Lewis followed the publication of this article with an equally well-received overview of development economics, The Theory of Economic Growth, also published in 1954 and destined to become the handbook of development economics in this period. In colleges and universities around the world and in ministries of finance and governmental and international planning organizations, these two publications provided the guidelines for promoting economic growth.

Even while Lewis was publishing these and other works, he made his talents available to government agencies. During and after World War II he advised the British Colonial Office about the ways Britain could alter its economic relations with colonial territories in preparation for the day when the British empire would devolve power to nationalist leaders. From 1950 to 1952 he served as a director of the Colonial Development Corporation, a British agency that identified potentially profitable projects in colonial areas in which to invest. He also advised colonial governments moving toward independence. At the request of the Ministry of Finance of the Gold Coast, he conducted an inquiry into the prospects of industrialization in that country and published an influential report on the topic in 1953, Industrialization and the Gold Coast Economy. When the Gold Coast became independent in 1957, he became that country's chief economic adviser, serving in that capacity for a little less than two years, during which time he helped to shape Ghana's first Five-Year Development Plan (1959–1963). After leaving Ghana, he became principal of the University College of the West Indies in 1959, and when the University College became a full-fledged independent university in 1961 (the University of the West Indies), he became its first vice-chancellor.

Although Lewis believed in the obligations of an intellectual to be a public servant, he experienced many disappointments in his dealing with government officials. He resigned as the secretary of the British Colonial Office's Colonial Economic Advisory Committee in 1943, protesting that the Colonial Office's vision of economic development was too conventional. The Colonial Office terminated his appointment as a director of the Colonial Development Corporation in 1952, in large part because of Lewis's criticism of Britain's failure to decolonize the white settler territories in British Africa. In Ghana he and the Ghanaian nationalist leader and prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, did not see eye to eye on development priorities, and he resigned his position in late 1958 before his two-year contract had expired. Finally, he left the vice-chancellorship of the University of the West Indies to take up a professorship of political economy at Princeton University in 1963 because his efforts to promote the political federation of the British West Indies had failed and left him exhausted.

At Princeton University, where he remained until he retired in 1983, Lewis continued his distinguished career as an economist. His most notable publications were The Evolution of the International Economic Order (1977) and Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913 (1978). He also took time away from teaching and academic responsibilities to be head of the Caribbean Development Bank from 1970 to 1973. Lewis continued to be an active scholar until his death at the age of seventy-six.

See also Education in the Caribbean; University of the West Indies

Bibliography

Frimpong-Ansah, J. H. "Professor Sir W. Arthur Lewis: A Patriarch of Development Economics." Paper presented at the annual conference of the Development Studies Association. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester, 1987.

Lewis, W. Arthur. The Theory of Economic Growth. Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1955.

Lewis, Sir Arthur. "Autobiographical Note," Social and Economic Studies (Mona, Jamaica) 29. no. 4 (1980, pp. 1-4).

Meier, Gerald M., and Dudley Seers, eds. "Sir Arthur Lewis." In Pioneers in Development: A World Bank Publication. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 119–137.

robert l. tignor (2005)