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

In Triumph of the Expert historian Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the growing influence of technical experts and advisors in determining British colonial development policies in the years between 1895 and 1960. Hodge traces in painstaking detail the intricacies of colonial policy making as imperial authorities grappled with the questions of science, agriculture, development, and colonial rule in primarily sub-Saharan Africa. These experts, who formed part of a wider circle of professional opinion and debate in the metropole, also acted as intermediaries between imperial research centers and local officials on the ground. Through their travels, tours, research, collaborations, and conferences they produced and managed colonial knowledge about development and give it greater institutional legitimacy and social authority. “In many ways, then, late British colonial imperialism was an imperialism of science and knowledge, under which academic and scientific experts rose to positions of unparalleled triumph and authority” (11).

The book is divided into 6 chapters. In the first chapter he suggests that it was nineteenth century British politicians like Joseph Chamberlain who popularized the idea that Britain should develop its colonies in the manner of an imperial trustee developing an agrarian estate. Such a view called for greater governmental intervention in development initiatives and prepared the ground for the rise of scientific and technical experts who would ultimately deliver this mandate. Chamberlain’s appointment as colonial secretary in 1895 gave further impetus to the idea that the colonies, especially in the tropics needed to be rationally exploited to facilitate economic development both at home and in the colony. In the next three chapters, Hodge examines the expansion of the development portfolio of the colonial state. Technical fields like tropical agriculture and medicine emerged with their own institutions for research and attendant body of experts. Colleges of tropical agriculture were established in Cambridge, Ceylon, Tanzania, Trinidad, and Singapore thereby creating a pan-imperial community of institutions and experts that would serve as a model of cooperation between administrative and technical services. By the 1930s colonial governments were themselves reorganized around specialist departments which gave more attention to the “human side” of development—confronting the problems of health, education, and social welfare. At the same time there was a growing admission of the need to consider the welfare of colonized peoples and sensitize development agendas to local needs. Elsewhere, the scope of tropical agriculture and health was broadened. They came to include a focus on not just the commodity based research of the plantation industry and sanitation, but also on soil erosion, local food production, nutrition, public health, and education (see Chapter 5 & 6). By the 1930s the idea of development had come to include the improvement of the social and economic welfare of colonial peoples through sound ecological and population management that encouraged community participation. Given this level of engagement, the Colonial Office (CO) which oversaw these developments grew dramatically in size in the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 7 covers the fifteen years of postwar development in Africa (1945-1960) where despite the stated goals of creating stable, prosperous, self sustaining rural communities, colonial policies and projects floundered in the midst of imperial ennui, anti-colonial resistance, and disagreements between colonial technical experts and administrators. Hodge in his conclusion points out that colonial development projects left behind a considerable intellectual legacy. Postcolonial development initiatives continue to view development as a large scale state directed project with a strong rural bias that celebrates community participation. In all this old colonial conundrums persist: of how to reconcile the ideals of better living standards and welfare for all in a world marked by environmental exhaustion and human poverty.

Hodge’s voice is a valuable addition, though not always recognized, to the recent literature on development.¹ By taking a historical approach he is better placed to unpack the argument that the colonial “will to improve” was not a single, unified, uncontested metropolitan project.² Rather, it was animated by the vagaries of...