Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism

5. View from the Field: Rethinking Colonial Agricultural and Medical Knowledge between the Wars, 1920–40

CH A P T E R 5 View from the Field Rethinking Colonial Agricultural and Medical Knowledge between the Wars, 1920–40 EVER SINCE THE TIME of Joseph Chamberlain, the structural problems of chronic high unemployment and a depressed and declining core of staple industries in metropolitan Britain had driven the colonial development agenda. Development was primarily thought of as a question of “opening up”the presumed natural riches of the tropics to serve the commercial interests of British trade and industry. The problem, it was believed , was largely one of distribution. Early colonial state efforts focused overwhelmingly on building transportation and communication infrastructures and capturing and redeploying indigenous labor power toward the development of primary resource and agricultural industries for the export market. There was a persistent fundamental assumption that what was good for British trade and industry would also have a beneficial effect on the moral and material advancement of colonial peoples. Such unbridled optimism for British colonial rule as an agent of social and economic progress was sorely tried in the years between the wars. Questions of trusteeship and responsibility for the welfare of indigenous You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. populations, as we have seen, gained saliency in the s through the agitation of colonial reformers and humanitarian lobbyists like Joseph H. Oldham. The onset of Depression in  reinforced this trend, shattering the illusion of a harmony of interests. Earlier justifications for colonial development lost their appeal in the wake of the apparent failure of policies premised on an export-led economic recovery.1 In Britain, government economic policy moved toward abandoning the once sacred principle of free trade, while in the colonies it became increasingly clear that social and economic conditions were getting worse, not better, as the decade wore on. Deteriorating conditions in the colonies, critics charged, were evidence of years of complacency, neglect, and exploitation. New attitudes were taking shape which by the end of the decade would usher in a far-reaching process of colonial reform, symbolized by the passing of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of .2 The  act championed a strong welfarist agenda.3 It was imagined as an attempt not to replicate the material conditions present in the imperial heartland of industrial Britain, but rather to mitigate the contradictions thrown up by private capitalist enterprise and colonial rule in the empire. At the center of the revolution in metropolitan thought were the perceived loss of productive force and the rise of a relative surplus population throughout much of the colonial empire. In stark contrast to earlier discussions of the problem of development, in which, as we have seen, an abundance of untapped resources and a want of population were held to be the greatest obstacles to the rapid social and economic transformation of the tropics, by the late s the pendulum had dramatically swung toward addressing the socioeconomic and environmental dilemmas gripping many colonial regions. There was a growing realization among officials and experts that they were facing a new set of problems: the limited and fragile nature of tropical environments and the appearance of surplus population in many areas. It was only after visions of impending ecological devastation and overpopulation instilled a new sense of urgency that imperial state interventions in the name of development were seriously contemplated and initiated with the aid of Treasury funds. The new coordinated policy aimed to create stable and sustainable agricultural communities that were protected from the vagaries of the world market. Development had come to mean planned, state-directed projects for improving agriculture, particularly local food production, and providing community welfare and social services in an attempt to allay the View from the Field |  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. misery of growing unemployment and poverty and the flow of rural emigration , not in Britain, but in the colonies themselves. The specialist advisers and metropolitan experts enlisted as part of the CO’s advisory network in London occupied a pivotal place in this redefinition of development principles. But the new development priorities and policy paradigm of the late...