The Ends of European Colonial Empires

Cases and Comparisons

Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, António Costa Pinto, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, António Costa Pinto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137394064
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume provides a multidimensional assessment of the diverse ends of the European colonial empires, addressing different geographies, taking into account diverse chronologies of decolonization, and evaluating the specificities of each imperial configuration under appreciation (Portuguese, Belgian, French, British, Dutch).

Part I

Competing Developments: The Idioms of Reform and Resistance

1

Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa

Frederick Cooper

For scholars, as for the leaders of colonial empires and anti-colonial activists, the period of decolonization was a moment of uncertainty. It was no longer politically possible to divide the world between advanced and primitive beings. Africa would no longer remain the exclusive domain of anthropologists, and anthropologists would be obliged to rethink what distinguished their domain of research. Historians of empire – whose job it had been to make known the accomplishments of whites in regions otherwise without history – were increasingly marginalized or obliged to convert themselves into historians of Africa or Asia. Sociologists, economists, and political scientists, for whom colonized territories had previously held little interest, saw opening before them a new world to discover – and a lack of theory with which to analyse it.

To understand the intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s and early 1960s in the various branches of the social sciences, one must first grasp the passions of the era: the opportunity to observe a fundamental change in world political order and the difficulties of rethinking its overturn. It was now possible to imagine a world without racial distinctions. Distinctions in level of development persisted, to be sure, but they could be overcome. If before the shock of the Second World and its aftermath such differences could be used to justify colonial tutelage, from the 1950s the political impossibility for a European state to continue to exercise trusteeship over an African territory became the rationale for a new range of interventions by the ‘developed’ world to accelerate the social and economic evolution of the ‘underdeveloped’ world.

The process of decolonization – beginning with the independence of India and Indonesia in 1946–47 through the independence of Algeria in 1962, of the Portuguese colonies (1975), and of the last British colonies (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 1979) – generalized the sovereignty of nation states. This process established, for the first time in history, the formal equivalence of political units across the globe. But economic and social situations were a long way from such equivalence, and this gap between the former colonizers and the decolonizing territories became more apparent, more dangerous, and more in need of examination than before.

The subject of this chapter is this moment of possibility and uncertainty. I will describe the new thinking about social and economic issues that emerged from the confrontation of colonial regimes and social and political movements from the late 1930s to the 1940s, and the response of social scientists to the transformed situation. I will concentrate on two examples: the foundation of a branch of economics focused on development and – at a higher level of generalization – modernization theory, including the analysis of ‘industrialization’ as basic to the way of life of the modern world. I will have something to say about anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork, for in this domain one sees a more nuanced history of social science’s approach to the decolonizing world, but one which does not contradict the key idea of the era, that of modernization. The relationship of social science and social policy was ambiguous, for colonial policymakers in the post-war years wanted to claim they were acting on the basis of scientific knowledge, without the knowledge base being very secure. Indeed, new thinking about how to analyse social and economic change in colonial situations emerged first not in the academy but in colonial bureaucracies themselves. An implicit modernization theory shaped colonial policy making in French and British administrations in the 1940s. Scholars soon responded both to the new demands for expertise, particularly in economics, and the new framing of social problems for them to analyse.

That knowledge-base took time to develop, even as weighty decisions about economic and social policy had to be made every day. And scholars did not agree on the details of programmes, or more importantly on their political and intellectual significance. At one extreme, modernization theory rationalized new forms of power to replace the now suspect colonial form: those with scientific knowledge and the experience of already accomplished ‘development’ could legitimately guide those not so far along the path. At the other end, researchers kept complicating the picture of a smooth path from tradition to modernity, revealing the conflicts and complexity attendant upon change and suggesting different choices might be made, that new forms of human suffering were emerging and that power could be exercised in different ways. American variants on ‘modernization theory’ epitomise the former tendency, in which change appeared as a self-propelled, all-enveloping process, whereas the ‘development’ concept pointed to the need for particular actions to bring about change, and hence to the importance of debating exactly what those measures should be, who should be empowered to decide and whose interests would be served by them.

From today’s perspective, all forms of evolutionary theory are suspect.¹ But one cannot understand the intellectual passions of the period 1945–60 without appreciating the importance in the South as well as the North of participating in a movement against the obstacles of the colonial system and towards opening to the great majority of people the possibility of their own actions improving their lives.

I will link my discussion of scholarly work to a narrative of social eruption in the late 1930s and 1940s, mounting conflicts in the vital economic centres of export-oriented colonies which forced a change in the direction of colonial politics. The new policies intended to gain control over the situation in turn provoked other sorts of tensions that placed increasingly difficult and costly burdens on the guardians of empire.

The administrator’s Africa

Within French and British colonial administrations from the conquest to the Second World War, interventionist policies alternated with a more limited policy of surveillance built around the conservation of the particularity of African societies. Early in the colonial era came the arrogance of the ‘civilizing mission’ of the French Third Republic, the effort of missionaries to open the continent to Christianity, and the anti-slavery doctrines of British humanitarians; but alongside this came efforts to make Africa the object of all sorts of projects to exploit its human and material resources – railroads, mines, plantations and the intervention of experts in agronomy and medicine.² By the time of the First World War, both French and British officials had learned how difficult it was to implement these projects – to reform Africa or to exploit it. In the vast spaces of the continent, officials had to co-operate with the very leaders who were the object of transformation. Officials had not counted on the tenacity of African political structures or the dynamism of social groups, capable of deflecting social reconstruction in unintended directions. Sometimes, colonial regimes profited from unintended innovations, the growth of peanut production by peasants in northern Nigeria, for example, when the government had tried to promote cotton cultivation on the large plantations of the indigenous aristocracy.

Important changes in African economies did not await the invention of the word ‘development’. But one should note the irony of colonial ideology in the 1920s: this was a period when peasant production of cocoa, coffee, peanuts and other crops was advancing in several regions, yet colonial governments were elevating the non-transformation of African societies into the central claim to the legitimacy of their rule. The responsible colonizing regime would, or so officials claimed, maintain the cultural integrity of African societies while slowly modifying them within their own terms. Such policies were consistent with the work of ethnographers – which became increasingly influential in the 1920s and 1930s – on the organization of particular African communities, but they did not imply the need for theories of evolution or transformation. The impact of medical-technical or ethnographic knowledge on the practice of colonial administration was varied and often ad hoc, but what counted most in the end was the authority of the white administrator who ‘knew his natives’.³

For a time in the early 1920s, some leading figures of British and French colonial establishments had argued for a more ambitious colonial policy. In 1923 Albert Sarraut, the minister of the colonies in several governments, published a sweeping book, La mise en valeur de l’Afrique Noire, proposing a programme of state investment to obtain a more rational and more serious exploitation of the continent’s resources. His British equivalent, Lord Milner, argued in 1919–20 for a more systematic effort to develop the infrastructure and resources of British colonies.⁴ But these two projects, despite the influence of their authors, were rejected by their own governments, mainly because officials expected higher returns from investments within the metropolis, but also because other men of influence, such as Frederick Lugard, opposed them for fear that active development would upset the delicate equilibria of Africa societies and the delicate relations between white officials and African indigenous authorities.⁵ It was the politics of ‘indirect rule’ that won the day, a colonial doctrine that celebrated the genius of colonial administrators to operate within the structures of kinship and chieftaincy, gently increasing peasant production while maintaining ‘customary’ law and ‘customary’ land tenure. In French Africa, policymakers followed similar practices, if not the name of this policy. Some administrators thought African cultivators could be turned into something like French peasants via colonisation indigène, their ‘nomadism’ tamed by settlement on better land, with French training and supervision, irrigation and orientation toward marketable crops designated by knowledgeable officials. But the most notable such experiment, the Office de Niger, was slow to develop the promised facilities, relied on questionable economic and agronomic assumptions, and was unable to get Africans to participate willingly, turning to coercion to acquire settlers and keep them from running away.⁶ To the extent that after the First World War educated Africans had become more politically active in both French and British Africa, as they had in some territories, the politics of indirect rule were a reaction, an attempt to enclose Africans within cages labelled as ‘tribes’.⁷ The very people who could have been the vanguard of African progress under colonial rule were instead pejoratively labelled ‘detribalized natives’.

The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of ethnography. It is not necessary to reduce the ethnographic scholarship of this era to an annex of imperial ideology – ethnographers did their work within the limits of the possible, limits that were practical but also those of the imagination. Some regarded themselves as defenders of the integrity and values of African societies against the encroachments of white settlers and labour recruiters, but the social order they described – an Africa divided into ‘tribal’ units – acquired its own reality, even if this was the reality of an historical conjuncture rather than a timeless Africa. The famous book on The Nuer by E. E. Evans-Pritchard⁸ brilliantly described a certain political organization of an apparently well-defined unit without acknowledging the fluidity and variability of its linguistic and cultural frontiers or that his fieldwork was done in the aftermath of a rebellion whose political effects therefore remained unexamined.⁹

British anthropology was making itself into a science. The thinking of its most notable figure, Bronislaw Malinowski, was more complex than the quest for the pure ‘tribe’, and he was interested both in social change and in the role anthropologists could play in improving colonial administration – something colonial administrators were not necessarily keen to see. The centrality of academic interests and the concerns of funders to support a science of humankind – as well as the need to tread cautiously in colonial waters – pushed the field towards systematic exploration of general principles of social organization and elucidation of human diversity. If the scientific spirit was thought to have a ‘depoliticizing influence’, as Malinowski claimed it would on his star African pupil, Jomo Kenyatta, this did not necessarily turn out to be the case. Kenyatta appropriated the language of functionalist anthropology, with its emphasis on the integrated way in which societies work, to assert the integrity of the Kikuyu people, who had made him into a spokesman in conflicts with white settlers and British authorities. Kenyatta was to show that a seemingly conservative vision of an ethnically bounded Africa, consistent with the politics of indirect rule, could be turned into a language of assertion and critique.¹⁰

If academic anthropologists, by a combination of choice and necessity, kept a certain distance from the dynamics of a colonized continent, some administrators were becoming increasingly concerned with the question of knowledge. By 1929, some members of the imperial establishment were insisting that ‘the time had come to substitute fundamental thinking for aimlessness and drift in the management of the Empire’.¹¹ But drift remained a basic characteristic of colonial rule, particularly in the revenue-starved Depression years. Nonetheless, the monumental survey of Africa, begun under Lord Hailey’s direction and published in 1938, at least put the importance of research on Africa onto the imperial table. Hailey’s paternalism and the scarcity of on-the-ground research, particularly into urbanization, wage labour, and political mobilization – limited the originality of the project, but n...