History is Not a Given

Dr. Diana Thorburn’s recent reflection on the role of history in policymaking offers a compelling description of the divide between academics and policy professionals. She argues that while academics often excavate the deepest roots of a problem tracing issues back to slavery or colonialism, policy makers must instead treat “history as a given” and focus on the inflection points that changed the course of things. Her example: rather than starting with slavery, we should begin with the 1970s to understand Jamaica’s education system, since that’s when the system we now live with began to take shape.

On the surface, this seems like a pragmatic distinction but on closer examination, it reflects a deeper flaw in how we define usefulness in public discourse. When we say “history as a given” we imply it has been accounted for, that it is settled - but history is not background music. It is not neutral; it’s not even equally inherited. For some, it might feel like context but for others, particularly those on the margins, it is the foundation shaping every interaction they have with the state. Education, security, land, healthcare: these are not systems that were re-invented in the 1970s. They were restructured, yes, but from a colonial angle that was never fully dismantled.

That is why starting our analysis in the 1970s might lead to a shallow diagnosis. If we begin at the point of reform without understanding what that reform was responding to, we risk assuming the system was neutral until it became problematic. However, our systems were not born in the 70s. They were built long before and under logics designed for exclusion, control, and hierarchy. Reform didn’t erase that - it often reorganized it.

Dr. Thorburn is not wrong to warn against endlessly tracing things backward. It is true: at a certain point, you can find historical explanations for everything. Nonetheless the solution is not to throw out root cause analysis altogether. The solution is to draw the line where the causes are still active. As such, in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, colonialism is not some distant force. It is recent, material, institutional and unique. It is not the Norman conquest in 1066 – it is not a metaphor. It is how our courts function, how our schools are structured, how land is distributed and how power moves. In fact, on Dr. Thorburn’s opinion of that analysis on Jamaica’s violence problem should start from the 1970s, I beg to differ. As the former acting Commissioner of Police Novelette Grant puts it: 

“Post independence Jamaica maintained… the same kind of doctrine that ran the colonial establishment, the same approach towards the poor and dispossessed. Perhaps there is something that runs in the society in terms of how we solve problems, maybe it is a result of history, the hard punitive approach on the plantation, where justice was distributed immediately. This is a society that has not successfully processed its history”.

Therefore, framing “history as a given” might sound like pragmatism, but it often becomes selective memory. Thus, this selectiveness tends to flatten the story in a way that’s politically convenient. It lets us move quickly but not necessarily forward because you cannot change outcomes if you misunderstand the systems producing them.

That is also why it is important to respond to the idea echoed through a quote from Dr. Nigel Clarke in his book, “Footprints in the Sand: The Jamaican Economic Policymaking Experience 2016–2024”  that intentional policy must reject “victimhood.” It sounds assertive, but what it often means in practice is rejecting the uncomfortable work of acknowledging what happened. There is a difference between dwelling on the past and being honest about how the past still shapes the present. The former traps us. The latter clarifies the path forward.

Nobody is arguing that policy should be paralyzed by history but policy that ignores it risks reproducing the very inequalities it is meant to correct. If we care about outcomes, we have to care about structures and structures do not begin at the inflection point. They bend and break long before it. That is not a theory; that is precision.

History doesn’t explain everything, but it explains enough that no serious effort to build better systems in Jamaica should treat it as background noise. It is not about rewriting the origin story.  It is about knowing what we are actually standing on before we start trying to build something new.