Best proposes a typology of economic systems as an alternative to theory built on North Atlantic experience. Caribbean economies belong to a class he calls hinterland economy: externally propelled, with the decisive choices made in a metropolis. Five standing conventions govern the relationship, covering exclusive spheres of influence, a division of labour confining the hinterland to raw output and rough processing, a currency backed by metropolitan reserves, metropolitan control of shipping, and preferential access to metropolitan markets.

Within that class he separates conquest hinterlands, settlement hinterlands, and a third kind given over to exploitation. The first organizes people for tribute. The second, worked by family farms on land free for the clearing, becomes a new metropolis in miniature, egalitarian and largely self-supplying. The third is where plantation economy belongs: labour imported for export production onto land that would otherwise permit subsistence, which requires institutions total enough to enclose a worker's whole existence. Plantation and chattel slavery together supply that framework.