The Report of West India Royal Commission, also known as The Moyne Report, was published fully in 1945 and exposed the poor 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.
Background
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.
For land owners to continue to make large profit margins, they required large quantities of property and large numbers of low-wage workers. Following the period of apprenticeship, which ended in 1838, the planters faced an economic crisis that challenged the current agriculture system; it was solved by the onset of indentured servants who arrived mainly from India.
Viable alternatives to plantation work would have placed the plantation economy in jeopardy; as a consequence, the brief moments of attempted diversification were squashed before they could even begin. In Trinidad, for example, the planter class attempted to take measures against the general population, which was growing rice and gaining in self-sufficiency. Not only there was resistance from local elites but also rice growers had to contend with crop damage due to pollution from the nearby oil fields Cultivation of agriculture alternatives was undertaken entirely by the poor peasant class on the small plots of land they had acquired.
With the institutional limiting of technological and economic growth and the hampering of attempts at indigenous entrepreneurship, the region and its people were denied any opportunity to develop social institutions that would meet their fundamental needs.
Economic and social conditions
The Great Depression made conditions in the West Indies much worse by a drastic decrease in exports and a sharp decline in the global price of sugar. Some agricultural industries suffered further damage from endemics of plant disease and poor weather. Substandard wages were cut further following the collapse on Wall Street, and underemployment and unemployment were the norm. Adding further strain to an already fragile society, those working internationally in the United States, Cuba, Panama and Costa Rica were repatriated. Many of those workers brought with them ideas about labour organisation, standards of living and a class consciousness that would, in turn, fuel the revolts and calls for reform in the 1930s. The ideas had been growing steadily since the 1880s even if social welfare and the economy remained idle.