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"Belonging," Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands)
Author(s) -
Maurer Bill
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1525/pol.1993.16.3.9
Subject(s) - citizenship , haven , citation , politics , tax haven , law , political science , sociology , history , tax credit , direct tax , combinatorics , mathematics
Bill Maurer Stanford Univers11y ' Belonging, Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands) People in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) with citizenship rights call themselves belongers.'' At present, about nine thousand immigrants from other Caribbean places live in the BVI, working primarily in construction and ser\'ice jobs. They make up fully 50 percent of the population. These people without citizenship rights call themselves non- belongers. Belonger and non-belonger are recent legal categories which, in the letter of the law, have nothing to do with citizenship. but rather land ownership and labor. 1 This paper is about how and to what effect legal personas defined in the land, labor and citizenship laws of the British Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom have turned into categories of identity. Jt is also about how immigrants deal with their position as essential yet unwanted members of a state increasingly dependent on the offshore financial services business - the transnational network of banks and corporations operating out of so-called tax havens like the BVI. The offshore finance sector is a recent development in global capitalism and is integral to what David Harvey ( 1989) has termed a regime of flexible accumulation. I hope to show how this new economic sector was itself encouraged by and has fostered a retrenchment of ideas about gender, family, race and class encoded in new laws and embodied in new state practices (cf., Martin 1992). This paper is based on dissertation field research which I have just completed, and is a preliminary attempt to bring together my ideas on citizenship and identity in the British Virgin Islands. Making Belongers The BVI is a dependent territory of the UK whose official currency is the US dollar. It has had its own locally-elected legislature since 1950. This Legislative Council created the categories belonger and non-belonger in the late 1960s in order to stave off a perceived English takeover; after neglecting their colony in the Caribbean for much of the century, white English people were now coming with hopes of earning a fast buck in the tourist business and in land speculation. Since at the time both Britons and BVlslanders had the same citizenship, the BVI Legislative Council concocted belonger status as a means of placing some checks on the activities of their fellow citizens from across the Atlantic.