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6. View from Above: The Consolidation of Knowledge and the Reorganization of the Colonial Office, 1935–45
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CH A P T E R 6 View from Above The Consolidation of Knowledge and the Reorganization of the Colonial Office, 1935–45 Every year it becomes more and more manifest that health, agriculture and education in the Colonial Empire are very closely bound together; that they are not so much three separate subjects as three aspects of the same subject, social and economic welfare, and that each aspect must be considered in relation to the others. —Malcolm Macdonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 19381 BY MOST ACCOUNTS, the years just before and during the Second World War constitute a turning point in the history of metropolitan policy toward the colonial empire.2 The problem of development was revised substantially from the earlier visions of Amery and his fellow “Constructive Imperialists.” Development thinking in the wake of the Depression swung sharply away from the Chamberlainite “Imperial Estates” doctrine, with its emphasis on augmenting British power and wealth and reducing British unemployment, toward a policy which can best be described as an attempt to ameliorate colonial conditions. Officials and experts in London were confronted in the late s by an empire that appeared to be in the grips of a series of dramatic social, economic, and ecological crises; the administration was shaken out of its usual slumber to find the very legitimacy of the colonial project challenged from both above and below. The most notable outcome of this reckoning was the much vaunted Colonial Development and Welfare (CD&W) Act of , which along with subsequent acts committed the British government to providing direct 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. subventions of imperial aid to help improve colonial living standards. The acts were a landmark not so much for the actual sums disbursed as for the acceptance of the principle first articulated by Chamberlain nearly half a century earlier, that development was something that could be made to happen by means of state agency, planning, and intention.3 The motivations which lay behind this novel stance had less to do with philanthropy than the conscious need to intervene to forestall and manage what one senior CO official later candidly described as a “social revolution.”4 But perhaps more than anything, the years between and opened up a whole new space for the expert—a space in which the members of the CO’s advisory bodies figured prominently. The CO’s advisory network provided an important forum not only for those with close official connections but also for academics and prominent critics interested in colonial affairs. As outside experts separate from the traditional geographic departments, they were to a certain extent free from the bureaucratic routine and procedure of the old CO structure. Out of the advisory discussions and committee work of the late s and early s emerged a wide consensus that colonial agricultural, educational, and health knowledge and expertise needed to be mobilized and the corresponding technical services better coordinated in order to bring about a comprehensive scheme of rural community development. The reports and memoranda produced by the CO’s advisory experts would provide the blueprints for the new integrated approach that, as we will see in the final two chapters, underpinned the conceptual framework not only of the early postwar colonial development drive but of much international development and environmental policy and state practice ever since. CO Advisers, Neo-Malthusian Crisis Narratives, and the Concept of Rural Community Development The concerns about land degradation, soil erosion, overcrowding, and malnourishment analyzed in the previous chapter were compounded in the s by the fallout of the Depression and the anxieties it generated both in Britain and the colonies. By world industrial production had been reduced by two-thirds what it was in . In Britain, production of iron and steel dropped by half, shipbuilding came to a grinding halt, and by the summer of some three million men and women were unemployed and almost seven million people were on the dole.5 The British national government responded by going off the gold standard, which sent | Triumph of the Expert 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. [3.17.6.75] Project MUSE (2024-04...
