Notwithstanding often insurmountable challenges and imbalances, tremendous progress has been and is being made.
For centuries, Europeans extracted all that they could from peoples around the planet, using with guile, violence and genocide. For more than 300 years, the British Empire grew fat and powerful from the incursions and the settlements it established in countries around the planet. From 1583, when the first English settlement was established, in what they then described as the ‘New Found Land’, later to be called Canada, the English, in competition with other European countries roamed the planet in a continuing search for newly populated territory. In that age of “discovery”, they arrived in the Caribbean Sea and immediately moved to unseat the Spanish, who had been occupying territories there for 100 years and more. These were the first steps in the rise of the British Empire.
The Caribbean climate was perfect for producing agricultural products which could not survive, let alone flourish, in Europe. And so, the British, the French, and the Dutch soon joined the Spaniards in claiming ownership of lands washed by the Caribbean Sea. Ownership of these territories was only the first step in a process by which wealth from production could be realised.
Agricultural production and shipment of produce such as tobacco, indigo, and ginger to Europe expanded in the early 17th Century driving the so-called Industrial Revolution that brought great wealth to Europe. The wealth generated from Caribbean sugar production, driven by enslaved labour and, later, by banana exports, was particularly significant in lifting the peoples of Europe out of the extreme poverty and deprivation they had endured for centuries before the rise of the British Empire. And it was the tools, designed and manufactured in that Industrial Revolution, that made it possible.
The fall of the British Empire in the first half of the 20th Century ultimately forced Great Britain to divest itself of the costs and commitments of a global empire. This it did by granting its former colonies “self-government” and leaving behind ageing tools and facilities. The subjects of British colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere were never to fully share in the wealth that their labour and investments had produced for three centuries and more. Instead, theirs was the task of making old, abandoned machines work in an increasingly sophisticated world. Indeed, the newly independent states were 
left in various stages of poverty to repair and use ageing, even archaic tools and facilities, including centuries-old railroads and seaports.
As the 20th Century came to an end, the technologies and systems that drove global commerce had become increasingly sophisticated and expensive to acquire and maintain. Small island states in the Caribbean had no choice but to finance, build and equip new seaports with the systems and technology of the day.
It is against this backdrop of history that, in the first quarter of this 21st Century, many Caribbean countries have had to finance, design and build new seaports; upgrade and expand cargo storage facilities; and, acquire and commission state-of-the-art cargo movement machines. Notwithstanding the often insurmountable challenges and imbalances faced by Small Island Developing States, tremendous progress in port development and modernisation in the Caribbean region has been and is being made. []
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FIRST PUBLISHED: December 1, 2025
– Mike Jarrett, Editor-in-Chief
