West India Royal Commission

The Report of West India Royal Commission, also known as The Moyne Report, was published fully in 1945 and exposed the horrendous living conditions in Britain's Caribbean colonies.Following the British West Indian labour unrest of 1934–1939, the Imperial Government sent a royal commission to investigate and report on the situation while also offering possible solutions. Sahadeo Basdeo points to the commission's investigation in the West Indies as a turning point in colonial attitudes. The uprisings were not seen as unprovoked violence, as they had so often been framed in the past, but as a justified opposition to a pathetic existence. Members of the commission asserted that the resistance that disrupted the Caribbean was not a spontaneous uprising with lofty cause but rather a demand from the labouring class for better and less restrictive lives.

The Moyne Report revealed that for the "labouring population, mere subsistence was increasingly problematic". The conditions were the result of institutional barriers that sought to maintain the colonial power structure.

Historian O. Nigel Bolland places a considerable emphasis on the stagnant economy in the British West Indies from the 1830s to the 1930s. To him, the economic foundations of slavery had remained unchanged for nearly 100 years. The majority of land holdings remained in control of a small planter class minority while coercion remained the dominant form of social control. A similar conclusion is reached by Jay R. Mandle. In looking solely at the Jamaican economy, the most developed in the British West Indies by 1930, Mandle shows that plantation economics still dominated to the point that per capita output was only slightly higher than when slavery was still the dominant means of labour in the early 19th century.

During the century since emancipation, the colonial government made minimal provisions that sought to limit agitation from labourers while taking greater measures to protect British interests and the plantation system. Previous commissions that evaluated the West Indies, such as the 1897 Commission chaired by Sir Henry Norman, recommended diversification and a shift away from plantation economics, but the recommendations went unheeded. Prior commissions to Norman’s would place emphasises not on the worker:s welfare or the colonies' economic well-being but rather strategies for maintaining a dependant labour force. For those reasons, social and health conditions remained relatively inert since emancipation.

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