Depression to Decolonization: Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926-1962

Kathleen Monteith, Depression to Decolonization: Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926-1962, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008, 355 pp.This book discusses the operations of Barclays Bank (DCO) in the British West Indies between 1926 and 1962. Jamaicans might well be aware that the National Commercial Bank (NCB), one of the largest banks currently operating in the island, evolved from Barclays. The book is indeed timely, since it comes at a time of global recession caused by the crash of the world banking industry. Interestingly enough, Barclays Bank in England was one of the very few banks that did not collapse. There is no doubt that the traditional conservative banking practices as discussed in this work contributed to its surviving this dilemma.Depression to Decolonization ia most unattractive title) is undoubtedly a path-breaking work, in that it is the first major academic business history of a commercial bank in the region, thus expanding the scope of West Indian economic history into the field of business history. It is a solid, comprehensive and definitive assessment of Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies; and it is inconceivable that any future historian could replace it without regaining rare access to the Barclays Bank Archives. Although it has no single astounding contention this book looks set to become a West Indian classic, and by it Monteith has established herself as a leading business historian of the Caribbean.The analysis is divided into three broad time periods: 1837-1926; 1926-1940 and 1940-1962. The first period marks the formative years of banking in the British West Indies, the second marks the entry and early years of Barclays Bank (DCO) then the largest multinational bank in the world, in the region. The third period marks the beginning of the gradual march of the British West Indies to self-government and independence. The year 1962, the terminal date, marks the coming of political independence in Jamaica and Trinidad, and the advent of the central banks (the Bank of Jamaica, for example). In 1926, what emerged as Barclays Bank was the incorporation of other banks, chief of which was the Colonial Bank that had existed in the West Indies from 1837, the year before the emancipation of the enslaved blacks in the British Caribbean. Hence the discourse quite fittingly begins at 1837. The Colonial Bank, unregulated except by its own charter from England, began operation as a trade bank giving only short-term loans on easily convertible securities to British merchants trading to the West Indies and also to wealthy West Indian merchants and planters, primarily sugar planters. Gradually it evolved into a commercial bank extending longterm loans to large plantation enterprises; small peasant farmers were not considered suitable clients for loans.By very cautious, conservative banking practices and policies, and prudent and skilful management, the Colonial Bank survived the financial difficulties of the nineteenth century and withstood competition from Canadian Banks (Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Bank of Canada) that had now entered the island to capture some of the business arising from the expansion in West Indian trade to Canada and the United States of America. Indeed the failure of indigenous banks, such as the Planters Bank in Jamaica and the West India Bank in Barbados around the same time as the Colonial Bank, as Monteith notes was a result of their being undercapitalized, poorly organized and managed, and physically far from the movers and shakers of colonial policy in London. The incorporation of the Colonial Bank into Barclays Bank Ltd in 1926, based on Monteith's interpretation, was more a strategic move of a successful bank than the convulsive gasp of a failed institution reeling under intense competition.Incidentally this might be the place to say that this book provides some very clear explanations of the economics of trade between the West Indies and the metropole; how it was organized and financed; how changing metropolitan tariff policies pulled down or propped up the sugar industry in these islands; and without the sugar industry iat least down to the 1950s and leaving aside oil in Trinidad) the bank would have had little or nothing to fatten on in these islands. …

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