James Carmichael Smith was born in the Bahamas in 1852, the son of an Englishman from Yorkshire and a black Bahamian mother.
[1] Smith began his service as the chief clerk and storekeeper of the imperial treasury and commissariat department from June 1876 to August 1889.
[1] In 1896, he was appointed Assistant Postmaster of Sierra Leone,[1][3] making him very likely one of a small number of people of colour serving in the British Colonial Service.
[1][2] He was a market socialist and egalitarian who published numerous books and writings promoting these views during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He also supported Caribbean integration, promoting the idea of federating the West Indies and charting their own path to prosperity.
He continues: "a league which, after inheriting the blessings of the latest civilization, would undertake the task of carrying or sending those blessings to the people of Africa by the hands of her own children; which would endeavour to teach the unenlightened people of Africa all the arts and manners of civilization, and so fit them to become citizens of free and independent nationalities.