Britain, the European Community, and the developing Commonwealth: dependence, interdependence, and the political economy of sugar

During the last decade dependency theory has emerged as an important, if highly controversial, perspective on contemporary North-South relations. This paper assesses the utility of dependency approaches by examining one concrete North-South relationship over an extended period, that between Commonwealth cane sugar producers and Great Britain. After detailing the origins of the colonial sugar trade and the later impact of British free trade policies, the article follows the evolution of British-Commonwealth sugar relations from the enactment of the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement in 1951 to the signing in 1975 of the Lome Convention's Sugar Protocol governing sugar imports into the enlarged Community. Two conclusions are drawn from this historical case study regarding the usefulness of dependency theory. First, dependency theorists exaggerate the cohesiveness of the posture of developed market economy countries toward the Third World. Second, dependency theory has too often neglected the need to explore realistic alternatives to dependency available to underdeveloped countries.