During the 1930s, episodes of violent protest by the inhabitants of Britain’s Caribbean colonies brought the extremely poor living and working conditions that existed in these territories to domestic and international attention. Revelations of widespread unemployment, squalid housing and malnutrition threatened the moral authority of British rule and provided fuel for critics of British imperialism. As a result, Britain made a commitment to improving living conditions in an area of the British Empire that it had previously neglected. This book explores the function of knowledge and expertise in the visions of economic development that were subsequently produced for the region, with a focus on the debate about encouraging new industry. Historians have often said that Britain was unwilling to sanction the growth of manufacturing in the Colonial Empire in order to protect markets for British industrial exports. In fact, officials in London saw the development of secondary manufacturing in the Caribbean as essential after the Great Depression in order to raise living standards and contain political dissent. Colonial Office plans included a vision of economic development that gave a key role to scientific research. The Colonial Office was inspired by recent discoveries such as nylon, poly-thene and penicillin to sponsor laboratory research that would trans-form sugar from a low-value foodstuff into a starting compound for the expanding chemical and fermentation industries. The expectation was that new factories producing the constituents of plastics, drugs and fuels from sugar would be established in the Caribbean itself. In this vision of industrialisation, state-funded research would enable Britain’s Caribbean colonies to participate in the emerging ‘brave new synthetic world’, and in doing so these places would find their eco-nomic fortunes revived.