To be a tourist is to find beauty in the very conditions that make local life unbearable: the drought that empties reservoirs becomes charming dryness, the broken-down infrastructure becomes quaint. The tourist is an ugly thing precisely because their pleasure depends on not seeing, or being pleased by, the native's ordinary misery.
Tourism exists because the tourist can leave the banality of their own life, while the native is trapped in a place too poor to go anywhere and too poor to generate the escape the tourist enjoys. Every native of everywhere is a potential tourist and every tourist is a native of somewhere, but the native's envy of the tourist's mobility curdles into resentment that the tourist never perceives.
The Antiguan public library was damaged in the 1974 earthquake and, years later, still bore a sign reading 'REPAIRS ARE PENDING' while remaining unrepaired, its books kept in a cramped space above a dry-goods store. The author treats this single unrepaired building as concrete evidence that the postcolonial government neglected institutions the British had at least maintained.
The colonized can only articulate their anger and their crime in the language of the criminal who colonized them, since that language is the only one available to express the experience. This traps the native: the very words used to denounce the injustice are themselves an inheritance of the injustice.
The author argues that local rulers after independence did not create corruption but learned it from the colonizers and then practiced it without the former restraint, so that a small place's bad government is continuous with, not a departure from, empire. Independence transferred the machinery of exploitation to new hands rather than dismantling it.