East Indians dominate Guyana’s private sector despite Afro-Creole political control

Evidence

As in the case of Trinidad, the challenge emerged from within the East Indian population through representatives of its working-class interests. In addition to their rejection by the middle classes, Afro-Creole assertions of nationhood were rendered problematic by the presence of an East Indian population that exceeds 50 percent of the country’s total. East Indians are strategically located in all the major institutional sectors of the political economy, much more so, in most cases, than the Creole population. This is true of the local private sector where ownership and control is almost exclusively East Indian. Their strategic presence in the private sector is bolstered by racially endogamous patterns of recruitment and hiring that typifies every sector of the political economy. There is, also, a significant presence of East Indians in the professional sector. They predominate in the country’s agroproductive sector, almost exclusively as cash crop producers and as plantation labor. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3264

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier Trinidad discussion and to general postcolonial ethnic-economy dynamics seen in other sources on Caribbean stratification.