Caymanian Scholars: What are they saying?

By Dr. Livingston Smith

In this series of articles, I will summarize and engage with the works of leading Caymanian scholars. Writing books is a fine and glorious endeavor, yet too often, after the excitement of a launch has passed, these works are shelved, forgotten, and fail to achieve the impact their authors had hoped for.

The aim of this series is to bring Caymanian scholarship into the public conversation with fairness, clarity, and courage. I want readers to understand what these scholars are saying, why their ideas matter, and how their work contributes to our national life. In doing so, I hope to encourage the public not only to seek out these books, but to read them thoughtfully and engage with them seriously.

Reading is vital. As Harold Bloom, the influential American literary critic best known for his work on the Western canon and poetic influence, reminds us in How to Read and Why, reading is not merely the acquisition of information but a deeply personal encounter that shapes the inner life and strengthens the imagination. But it does more than that in my view. Reading is vital to the stimulation of national conversations on matters of importance, providing the depth, context, and intellectual discipline such discussions require. It is reading that gives substance and verve to a national dialogue that is serious, informed, and ultimately worthwhile.

I will begin with Roy Bodden’s latest scholarly work, Deconstructing Development: Immigration, Society and Economy in Early 21st-Century Cayman, which was launched recently. In this first article, I will consider the prologue, entitled “The Elephant in the Room,” as well as the introduction.

In the opening of De-constructing Development, Bodden says that if Caymanians want to understand what the Islands have become, they must stop accepting the glossy “success story” at face value and ask the harder question he has been asking since 1978: For whom are we developing? He frames the book as an attempt to tell Cayman’s story from the inside. In doing so he says he is echoing Chinua Achebe’s warning that when only the “hunter” tells the story, the “lion” is misrepresented.

Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian novelist, essayist, and cultural critic, famously warned that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” His insight speaks directly to the importance of Caymanians telling their own stories and interpreting their own social, economic, and cultural realities. Caymanian scholarship, when read and engaged seriously, ensures that our national narrative is shaped from within rather than defined solely by external voices or unexamined assumptions.

Bodden’s point is that Cayman’s recent history has been too often narrated by outsiders, investors, official, etcetera, while the lived experience of established Caymanians, especially those pushed to the margins, has been minimised, softened, or ignored.

Bodden argues that the central force transforming Cayman is globalisation, and that most public debates underestimate its role. In his telling, Cayman’s modern rise, begins with Caymanian seamen who travelled widely on ships “flying flags of convenience,” sending remittances home that helped shift Cayman from subsistence life into modern cash prosperity. Within a few decades, Cayman made an unusually rapid leap from schooners to jet travel, from isolated island life to international visibility. But globalisation did more than bring money; it opened the door to the modern economy’s “triad” that, in Bodden’s view, cannot be separated: immigration, society, and economy. Immigration supplies labour; the economy fuels expansion; society absorbs the social and moral consequences. Together, they drive Cayman forward, but also destabilise it, he argues.

A major theme introduced early is what Bodden calls Cayman’s “duality” by which he means the coexistence of “paradise” and “plantation.” Paradise, he says, is the image sold to tourists and enjoyed by the wealthy: a place of comfort, leisure, safety, and high living. The plantation, on the other hand, is the underside: the labour system, low wages, overcrowding, rising rents, fragile livelihoods, and sharp social hierarchy that supports paradise. Bodden uses the plantation metaphor deliberately: he argues that modern Cayman increasingly resembles an old Caribbean pattern where the best land and the greatest benefits concentrate among a privileged few, while the working majority becomes controlled, replaceable, and exploited. To people only passing through, the Islands can look like a harmonious, prosperous society. Bodden insists that beneath that surface is a tense structure where inequality, contested space, and cultural displacement are growing.

From there he turns to immigration as a central pressure point. Bodden describes a shift from Cayman as a quiet frontier society to Cayman as an increasingly contested space shaped by a large and continuing inflow of migrant workers and expatriates. He traces key waves: British professionals relocating after political change in the Bahamas; Jamaican migration accelerating after Jamaica’s political and economic turmoil in the 1970s; and later arrivals from across the Caribbean, Central America, and further afield. His argument is that Cayman’s economic model has depended on imported labour to sustain rapid development but that this has produced an unintended (or at least unmanaged) outcome: established Caymanians becoming a minority in their own country, with growing anxiety about belonging, identity, and cultural survival.

Bodden’s account is blunt about cultural friction. He says many immigrants arrived with little interest in assimilation, while Caymanians became increasingly alarmed at changing social norms. He points to shifts in language, behaviour, sexual mores, household patterns, and public morality. These changes he frames as a departure from Cayman’s earlier Victorian/Judeo-Christian norms. He also describes the emergence of labels and stereotypes aimed at newcomers and the hardening of attitudes over time, especially toward Jamaicans, who became the most visible migrant group in work and business. He argues that the immigration question is no longer a narrow policy issue but that it has become Cayman’s most explosive national debate because it touches everything: jobs, wages, housing, land, politics, identity, and social cohesion.

Bodden then sketches Cayman society as a four-tier hierarchy, with wealthy metropolitan expatriates at the top, followed by near-White Caymanians and professionals, then the middle class, and at the bottom the working poor—made up largely of Black Caymanians and migrant workers. He emphasises that wealth increasingly allows the upper tiers to live physically separated from everyone else, in gated subdivisions that resemble global luxury enclaves more than local Caribbean communities. In his view, this creates a Cayman where rich and poor increasingly occupy different worlds, with fewer shared spaces and fewer everyday interactions. He argues that land, especially prime land, has become a commodity that young Caymanians will struggle to access, as property prices are driven by global money and by development decisions that prioritise high-end markets.

Finally, in the sections on the economy, Bodden traces Cayman’s transformation from remittance-supported life, to tourism, to “tax haven” and eventually global finance supported by enabling laws such as the Companies Law of 1960. He credits early political and administrative figures for recognising Cayman’s economic potential but stresses that key warnings were ignored, particularly warnings not to sell Cayman’s land outright and to plan development carefully. Tourism brought modernity, improved living standards, and greater workforce participation by women; but it also created labour shortages that triggered more importing of workers. Over time, Bodden argues, Caymanian workers faced rising service expectations, increased competition from cheaper labour, and a growing sense that the system was structured against them. He raises concerns about “leakage” in tourism (profits flowing abroad), widening inequality, weakened prospects for the middle class, and the possibility that Cayman’s political and commercial centre could shift away from traditional Caymanian spaces.

The overall message of the introduction is that Cayman’s development has produced impressive wealth and international stature, but it has also created deep tensions over land, identity, citizenship, inequality, corruption, and social stability. and the society is approaching a dangerous tipping point if these tensions remain unmanaged.

Some Conclusions

Bodden’s opening sections do three important things at once. First, they present a different way of looking at Cayman’s success story, inviting readers to move beyond familiar stories of growth and prosperity. Second, they suggest that the main challenges facing the country are structural rather than personal—that is, they arise less from individual choices or shortcomings or cultural deficiencies and more from structural issues: the systems, policies, and long-term decisions that shape how society functions. Finally, Bodden argues that Cayman’s greatest risk is not economic failure, but social division, the gradual erosion of trust, and cohesion which can emerge when these deeper issues are left unexamined and unattended.

A casual reader might think the book is mainly anti-immigration. But the deeper claim is that Cayman adopted an economic model that requires constant imported labour, yet failed to build a stable social settlement around that reality. When a society depends on migrant labour but does not create widely accepted rules for belonging, rights, wages, housing, and long-term integration, it ends up with distrust on all sides: locals fear displacement; migrants feel exploited; employers treat labour as disposable; and politicians dodge decisions until crises explode. As social scientist, Bodden seeks to present an analysis of the various factors, drawing conclusions as he sees them.

Bodden uses the plantation metaphor to bring home the point that development is not only about GDP, skyscrapers, and arrivals but how human beings are arranged and stratified in the process, who bears costs, and who receives benefits. “Paradise” is a society where comfort is protected; “plantation” is a society where comfort is produced. The danger he sees is that Cayman could normalise a system where many people are essential to the economy but remain socially marginal, economically squeezed, and politically voiceless. If that happens, the society may look stable, until it suddenly isn’t. This is an important take-away from these first sections.

Bodden repeatedly returns to land because, in small islands, land is not just an asset; it is identity, inheritance, security, and dignity. His fear is disenfranchisement: a future where the descendants of those who built Cayman cannot afford to own Cayman. That is why his old question “For whom are we developing?” keeps returning. For him, land sales to outsiders and soaring property prices, in addition to being economic issues, they also threaten Cayman’s continuity as a Caymanian society.

Bodden’s opening sections are also an indictment of repeated political evasions: commissions that produce reports, recommendations shelved, backlogs building until the problem becomes explosive, and then chaotic “fixes” that deepen bitterness. His implied argument, in fact, in later chapters, stated more explicitly and bluntly, is that Cayman’s development has not been guided by a coherent national vision. It has been driven by market forces and short-term decisions while political leaders postpone the hard questions especially about immigration, land, and long-term social cohesion.

Whether or not one agrees with Bodden’s conclusions, this is careful and valuable analysis. He brings together the key forces shaping contemporary Cayman which are the economy, globalization, immigration, modernization, housing and land, inequality, and social tension and shows how they interact. In doing so, he offers readers a way to see Cayman as a connected system rather than a set of isolated problems, which is, at its core, the essential craft of social science. In the next article, I will look at his next chapter- A Nuanced Introduction to 21st Century Caymanian Society.