small and impoverished, an autonomous sovereign state. Foreign interests
continue to dominate many realms, notably tourism, the islands' economic
life blood. But neocolonialism notwithstanding, the descendants of the folk
depicted in this book have come a long way. Whereas colour and class
barred their forebears from any effective role, their great-grandchildren to-
day are, and know themselves as, masters of their own house.

The 1897 Commissioners proved prescient in one major respect: fore-
seeing planter demise in the Windwards, they acted to enlarge peasant
smallholdings. In St Vincent, the most regressive plantocracy, land reform
was most needed and bore the earliest fruits. Grenada's energetic and pro-
gressive peasant proprietors were field up as a model the other Windwards
should follow. It is ironic that a century later Grenada again became a
model of new peasant reforms-reforms seen as so fearsomely marxisant
that metropolitan powers and Grenada's own neighbours stepped in to
quash them.

Let me conclude on a happier irony. Who could have dreamed that
little patois-speaking St Lucia, a century back the least integrated and worst
schooled of the Windwards, would emerge as the seed-bed of two Nobel
laureates, whose insights in global economics and Creole literature today
enlighten the whole world? From exporting logwood, St Lucians have
graduated to disseminating Logos-a more sustainable resource than any
envisioned by Colonial Office or colonials of the era this book so fully re-
evokes.

David Lowenthal
January 1997

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