The Promised Land speaks to the great human drama of the marginalized and dispossessed quests for material well-being, empowerment, enfranchisement, and self-determination.
Forthcoming May 2025
Vieux Fort, a Caribbean town at the southernmost tip of St. Lucia and furthest point from the capital and largest city, is blessed with unparalleled infrastructure and favorable natural attributes, yet it continues to lag behind the northern part of the island and never seems able to realize its full potential.
In The Promised Land, the first of The Vieux Fort Chronicles book series, Dr. Reynolds, arguably St. Lucia’s foremost public intellectual and authority on the island’s socioeconomic history, shows how government neglect, misadventure, and exploitation, along with poor governance and political representation, have kept Vieux Fort backward and prevented it from living up to its promise.
However, he doesn’t stop there. He advises on who must govern (“run”) Vieux Fort and how best to govern (“run”) the town to pull it out of its socioeconomic morass and set it on the path of progress.
Vieux Fort is the main focus of the book, but its relevance goes far beyond the district. Its prescriptions on how, for best results, district representatives must look after their constituency are applicable not just to Vieux Fort and other St. Lucian district representatives but to parliamentary representatives throughout the world.
The Promised Land demonstrates that, contrary to economic textbooks and as revealed in Why Nations Fail, underdevelopment has less to do with size, resources, and technology, and more to do with neglect, mismanagement, government misadventure, and political and economic extraction.
Sir Arthur Lewis gave us the dual-sector model of economic development; Dr. Reynolds has gifted us a recipe for the socio-economic upliftment of provincial regions. However, above all, The Promised Land speaks to the great human drama of the marginalized and dispossessed quests for material well-being, empowerment, enfranchisement, and self-determination.