Tribute to Lloyd Best
A Great Conceptualiser
Norman Girvan

I first met Lloyd Best in 1960 when he was a young economics researcher on the Mona Campus of the UWI and I, an economics undergraduate.  Lloyd had a huge impact on a group of students that included Walter Rodney and Orlando Patterson and many others who went on to make a name for themselves in the social sciences, history, literature and politics. He was the intellectual leader of a discussion group called the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues that met every week at his house on College Common; the precursor of the New World Group that was formed by Lloyd and David DeCaires in Guyana in 1962. This group activity developed a series of critical analyses of the economics, politics and sociology of the colonial and emerging post-colonial order in the West Indies. ‘Industrialisation by Invitation’, the ‘theory of plantation economy’, ‘plantation society’ and ‘Doctor Politics’ were concepts which Lloyd originated that shaped the development of Caribbean social sciences in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. My own work on multinational corporations, dependency and regional integration owes a great deal to Lloyd’s influence and encouragement. Dozens of books, journal articles and pamphlets and radical publications including New World Quarterly and newspapers like Moko and Tapia in Trinidad and Abeng in Jamaica were among the offshoots of a powerful intellectual movement whose objective was the intellectual decolonisation and social and economic transformation of the Caribbean; a movement that had a significant impact on politics and government policies in the region.

Throughout his life Lloyd has been a ‘Great Conceptualiser’--a source of inspiration and of a constant flow of new ideas and of ways of seeing the world and the Caribbean reality that profoundly influenced the thinking of several generations of scholars and political activists. His robust and eloquent advocacy of a Pan-Caribbean cosmology that knows no linguistic boundaries and that is rooted in our own experience and aesthetic has evoked a sympathetic response from a people seeking to affirm its own unique identity and to forge a sense of regional nationhood out of what had been the forgotten outposts of an empire in decline. Above all, Lloyd has been an exemplar of the practice of critical, independent thought. In this sense his contribution is timeless; and the entire Caribbean nation will forever be in his debt.