ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two questions about Ida Greaves’ problematic position in the academic community in the 1950s. First, there is the question of why her assessment of the costs and benefits of the colonial monetary system brought such a strong negative response from fellow economists. Second, why were contemporaries in the social sciences, sociologists and social anthropologists, so antagonistic towards her approach to the role of the plantations in tropical areas? On the monetary system, it is apparent that she was unable or unwilling to subject the institutions which underpinned the currency boards and sterling area, to close political scrutiny. However, much of her technical approach to currency boards has been largely vindicated in more recent times. On plantations, although she was fully conversant with their historical and social defects, and wrote about them extensively in her earlier work, on other occasions she chose to concentrate on economic perspectives, producing pioneering work strongly rooted in classical analysis.
