Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

11. Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism

300 11 Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism Joseph M. Hodge Throughout sub-Saharan Africa as well as other regions of the world, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, a new kind of authoritarian social engineering and state intervention directed at agrarian societies was embarked on by European colonial regimes in the 1940s and 1950s, which found its most definitive form in the implementation of numerous land settlement and agricultural development schemes.1 More than seventy major agricultural development initiatives were in operation throughout the British colonies by the mid-1950s, including pilot projects for water and soil conservation and food production; numerous land improvement and resettlement schemes; various mechanized cultivation projects for cotton; rice and paddy cultivation; tractor plowing and hiring units; drainage and irrigation schemes; and cooperative and group farming ventures, among many others.2 Like their counterparts in other late colonial empires, these projects were often based on designs derived from earlier landuse planning models and policy objectives, but were implemented on a much larger scale and with far greater speed after the war, enabling colonial bureaucratic power to extend into rural areas as never before. The magnitude and intensity of postwar government activity in nearly Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines |  every aspect of rural colonial people’s lives amounted in all but name to what D. A. Low and John Lonsdale have strikingly termed “the second colonial occupation” (1976, 13). Despite the vast influx of financing, expertise, and state bureaucracy , however, many of the new development ventures of the early postwar years proved to be disappointingly unsuccessful. As colonial regimes increasingly resorted to heavy-handed state measures and compulsory legislation to solve rural problems, they inadvertently deepened social discontent and anticolonial resistance in many territories .3 Structural inadequacies ignited bureaucratic tensions and policy debates, not only between metropolitan ministries and local colonial administrations but within the colonial state itself, creating what often amounted to a governmental impasse. The enigmatic aims of policy also generated much friction and paralysis, as authorities strove to balance the imperatives of reasserting order and stability on the one hand, and intensifying production and productivity on the other; of raising colonial living standards and welfare while also maintaining soil fertility and the conservation of colonial resources. Although these late colonial development initiatives were often ineffective, or even outright failures, the ideological and structural biases implicit in them would live on long after the formal transfer of colonial power. Though the new, independent governments of the 1960s repudiated many of the former colonial policies, especially conservation measures, in favor of more-extensive plans or high-profile projects, the principal effect was often the same: the expansion and entrenchment of bureaucratic state power in the name of development.4 Indeed, one of the major legacies of the late colonial era, as Christophe Bonneuil has recently argued, was the large-scale prepackaged settlement and social engineering schemes, which, although first initiated by colonial rulers, continued to hold currency among development practitioners and national elites until the post-1980 crisis of the state in Africa and elsewhere (2000, 260–61). In fact, the early post-independence years saw a bold renewal of large, technocratic programs as the new ruling elites sought to triumph where the old colonial guard had failed, launching huge mechanization schemes and subsidizing the widespread use of artificial fertilizers.  | Joseph M. Hodge At the center of these schemes was the growing power of the state and scientific experts over the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of African or other former colonial people. The planning and management of these projects created demands for new kinds of knowledge and expertise, stimulating the emergence of scientific communities and research services, and elevating technical officers and advisers to positions of greater status and influence in government. This chapter looks at the crucial role British tropical agriculture and natural resource experts played in the dissemination and institutionalization of scientific knowledge and authority in the late colonial and early postcolonial epoch. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the fact that much of the received wisdom about development and environmental problems today has been historically constructed, reproduced, and translated into public policy paradigms that serve specific institutional and political purposes.5 This study examines some of the key assumptions and biases that informed colonial advisers and technical officers during the last decades of European rule. Many of these men...