Ida Greaves, who was born in Barbados in 1907, is one of the "missing female voices" of early development economics. This biography, the first for Ida Greaves, attempts to construct her career and era before the past wholly disappears.
The biography covers her early years in Barbados, her time at boarding school in England, at McGill University in Canada where she focused on human behaviour under the influence of changing social and political histories and also published an early path-breaking study of black migrants into Canada, and her later research at Harvard and Columbia in the United States and at the London School of Economics. Individual chapters follow her career acting as economic adviser to the Colonial Office in London, where she worked alongside Arthur Lewis, and at the fledgling United Nations in New York. She published in top journals and produced an outstanding study of the influence of colonial monetary systems on poor countries.
This accessible biography provides unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period in late colonial history. The issues it raises of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment, are of no less relevance today than they were in her lifetime.
1. Early Education
2. The Lasting Legacy of McGill
3. Harvard, Bryn Mawr and the London School of Economics
4. Modern Production Among Backward Peoples (1935)
5: American Interlude
6. The Colonial Office and LSE
7. Colonial Monetary Conditions
8. Towards a Conclusion
Postscript: Ida Greaves: A Pioneer Development Economist?
Appendix: The Currency Board Mechanism and the Sterling Area
Biography
Barbara Ingham is an economist who has written extensively on development issues. Her research features the institutions in which development policy emerged from the 1930s onwards. She has co-authored the biography of a Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis and papers on Arthur Lewis and the Windrush Generation.
