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REVOLUTION IN THE COLONIES DoNALD Cow1E THAT industrial rroolution is meant should not detract from the sting of the title; for we are beginning to learn that ev. erywhere rapid industrialization can affect commumttes more profoundly than the most sanguinary political upheavals. Nearly two centuries ago the industrial revolution came to England; the last war brought it at length to the Dominions; today it is the turn of the most primitive lands, in Africa, Asia, the western and eastern archipelagoes-and some interesting problems have been set thereby, especially for the administrators of the last real British Empire. The forced draught of an unprecedentally global war has of course been responsible. The mushroom growth of factories and communications which transformed the economy of a Canada during 1914-18, has this time wrought similar changes in a Nigeria and a Ceylon.. Thus merely to list the new industries that have been established in .the British Colonial Empire since 1939 would req~ire the space of this article-and probably such a degree of blue-pencilling by the Censor as to make the result quite unreadable . It is proposed rather to take a comprehensive view and try to trace the leading tendencies. The outstanding,point may be that industrial revolution has come awkwardly to these latest colonial lands. Factories for the Dominions twenty-five years ago were not incongruous, but the very idea of chimney-stacks and trade-unions in the African jungle is sufficiently startling to reveal the prime weakness of recent developments. Experts asked to pronounce before the war on how long it wou.ld take for most of the colonies to become fullfledged industrial states would have replied in terms of decades, perhaps hundreds, of years: the exigences of war have made it necessary to squeeze that normal development into the space, often> r;>f a few months. T wo observations proceed from this initial statement: the first, that recent colonial industrialization inay easily be exaggerated , for it c~nnot as yet have more,than scratched the surface of vast, primitive territories; the second> that mushrooms do not Live 400 . REVOLUTION IN THE COLONIES 401 long, so that once the pres17nt abnormal conditions cease to exist there may a temporary end to many colonial ente.rprises. Of these observations, the first is probably the more valid. Newspaper readers note t hat oxide of vanadium has been discovered in Ceylon, and will prove invaluable in the war effort because it is necessary for the manufacture of special alloy and steel for high-speed tools and vanadium bronze for munitions, and because normal world supplies are very limited. Then they read that present exigences have revived the .Ceylon rubber industries. And being simultaneously told about the hectic transformation of Ceylon into a forward base for naval and aerial operations against the Japanese in south-east Asia, they form a picture in their minds of a colony which was an unspoilt tropical paradise before the war and is now a \\'itwatersrand, a Silvertown~ a clattering Portsmouth. \Vhereas the fact is that the vanadium may have S9 far been delivered only in sample, that the rubber production may be of the more primitive order and very badly organized, and the naval and aerial works confined to certain areas and of the more portable, modern variety. That also may be something like the truth about developments .in many other countries. It was said before the war that the only colonial territories with a reasonable quota of secondary industries were Hongkong aod Palestine. Probably this dictum still holds, and while the Hongkong factories are now being worked by the Japanese, those in Palestine have become less and less colonial in status. ยท A public speaker refers to the great possibilities in the East African manufacture of ceramics, bricks, tiles and pottery, as b~ing peculiarly suitable to local conditions, but omits to mention that the chief development so far is that a research committee has . explored those possibilities. In some instances rapid industrialization has taken place, has boomed and then disastrously sagged, as in the case of Northern Rhodesian copper mining, hard-hit recently by the British Government's decision to reduce copper pur~hases between...

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