Triumph of the Expert

Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism

Joseph Morgan Hodge

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780821417188
• eBook ISBN: 9780821442265
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.

Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Terms of the Debate

Science, the State, and the “New Imperialism”

IN ONE OF HIS FIRST major speeches after becoming secretary of state for the colonies in 1895, Joseph Chamberlain, the one-time Radical mayor from Birmingham, announced at Walsall that

Great Britain, the little centre of a vaster Empire than the world has ever seen, owns great possessions in every part of the globe, and many of those possessions are still unexplored, entirely undeveloped. What would a great landlord do in a similar case with a great estate? We know perfectly well, if he had the money, he would expend some of it, at any rate, in improving the property, in making communications, in making outlets for the products of his land, and that, it seems to me, is what a wealthy country ought to do with regard to these territories which it is called upon to control and govern. That is why I am an advocate of the extension of Empire.¹

By the time Chamberlain made this declaration he had become one of the greatest exponents of the fin-de-siècle drive for European overseas expansion and conquest in Africa and Asia. The seemingly limitless possibilities opened up by the recent penetration of the African continent and other tropical regions inspired many prominent explorers, philanthropists, businessmen, and political leaders in various European countries to urge their governments to, as King Leopold of Belgium put it, claim their piece of this magnificent African cake.

Chamberlain began his parliamentary career in the 1870s as a Liberal MP under William Gladstone and quickly rose to become leader of the party’s Radical wing. The Radical program aimed to transform Britain into a popular middle-class democracy, completely unrestrained by tradition and free from the power and privilege of Anglicanism and the landed elite. But Chamberlain clashed with Gladstone over the question of Irish home rule. He and his supporters, known as Liberal Unionists for their support for the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, ran as a separate party in the general election of 1886 and later defected to the Conservatives. A trip to North America in 1887 proved to be an epiphany for Chamberlain, opening his eyes to the ideal of a Greater Britain as a way of countering what he perceived to be the steady disintegration of the ties of empire. Upon his return, and for the rest of his life, Chamberlain reinvented himself as the most self-conscious and ardent imperial spokesman of his day, giving voice to the dream of a new imperial federation between the white colonies and Britain.

Chamberlain and his supporters went further, though, offering a bold, forward-looking policy for the more efficient use of the country’s vast colonial possessions in order to revive the British economy, ailing under the effects of the late nineteenth-century depression and growing competition and protectionism from the United States and continental Europe. Under Lord Salisbury’s Unionist coalition government,² from 1895 until 1903, Chamberlain gave shape to his imperial estates program, attempting to supplant the laissez-faire philosophy of nineteenth-century liberals with a new kind of state-directed, “constructive” imperialism. He called on the British government to provide the necessary financial and technical assistance for the extension of imperial communications, especially railways, and other infrastructural projects in order to facilitate the mobilization of the largely unexplored wealth of Britain’s tropical colonies in Africa and the East.³ He lobbied hard to convince the permanent staff at the Colonial Office (CO) of the utility of scientific knowledge and technical expertise, especially in the fields of tropical medical and tropical agricultural research and training.⁴ He played a pivotal role in setting up the West India Royal Commission, which included botanical advisers from Kew and which recommended grants and subsidies to aid the declining sugar industry and to encourage economic diversification of the islands.⁵

By employing the agrarian metaphor of a great estate in need of development, Chamberlain was very consciously articulating language associated with a landed, conservative ethos in order to appease Tories who feared his Radical roots and previous association with urban politics.⁶This was, to some degree, a tactical move by Chamberlain to broaden his “business” view in a way that offered the Conservative-dominated Unionist Party a chance to refashion itself as the party of empire through a new and dynamic imperial policy. But his rhetoric also spoke to the continuing resonance of long-held assumptions and ideological tropes rooted in earlier moments of imperial crisis and expansion. There is a strong ideological bridge, as recent studies have shown, between the fin-de-siècle doctrines of empire-builders like Chamberlain and the earlier domestic and imperial policies of the age of William Pitt the Younger and Sir Joseph Banks.⁷ Late eighteenth-century advocates of agrarian improvement also envisioned an alliance of science and the state that would work toward the dissemination of progress both in Britain and the empire. However, this continuity at the ideological level should not distract us from the fact that Chamberlain’s proposal for an association of government and expertise to actively and intentionally develop the natural (and, later, human) resources of the colonies did indeed represent a watershed in the rationalization of the British Empire. It set the terms and parameters of political and philosophical debate for decades to come.

In recent years, historians have once again highlighted the importance of the cultural and ideological dimension of modern European colonialism.⁸ Imperial ideologies were not simply window dressing or rhetorical flourishes meant to obscure the real material motives behind expansion and conquest. Understanding the way in which ideological discourses were created, disseminated, institutionalized, and recast is central to understanding how officials viewed themselves as rulers and how they perceived the peoples and lands over which they ruled. Such discourses defined the limits of what could and could not be done. Nor were these sets of meanings monolithic and unchanging. Recent scholarship has highlighted the tensions and constraints that afflicted imperial efforts to impose power on other peoples.⁹ Although there was much continuity to imperial doctrine, the meaning of the language of imperialism evolved over time in response to changing circumstances both at home and abroad. It was also laden with paradox and ambivalence, reflecting the contradictory and often enigmatic nature of policy-making and colonial administration on the ground.

This chapter builds on the new colonial historiography, examining the origins and reiterations of earlier assumptions and ideologies of “improvement” and “development” both in Britain and the empire, as well as the significance of Chamberlain’s crucial entrance into colonial affairs in the 1890s. I argue that Chamberlain’s years at the CO represent a critical moment in the British Empire, marking the effective beginning of the story of the triumph of the expert. In other words, the significance of the “New Imperialism” lies not so much in the novelty of its rhetoric as in the way it tied older arguments and metaphors to a new vision of the imperial state, and in the way it bound the development imperative to the rising agency of scientific knowledge, technical expertise, and state planning.

From Empty Lands to Tropical Abundance: Ideologies of Improvement and Development in Britain and the Empire before 1890

The term “development,” according to H. W. Arndt, first appeared in the lexicon of economic discourse around the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁰ Before then, political economists and moral philosophers had spoken instead of the progress of nations toward a state of “opulence” and “improvement.” It is indeed difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the language of improvement—that ultimate Georgian buzzword—reverberated in the minds, treatises, and speeches of British Enlightenment thinkers.¹¹ At the heart of the eighteenth-century idea of universal improvement was a belief that those who made the most efficient use of the material and human resources of the nation and its colonies had a right to control them. It implied a way of living and ecological use that exalted the benefits of fixed agriculture and husbandry, private property, and the production of commodities for the market.¹² We can trace the origins of the late eighteenth-century ideology of agrarian improvement back many centuries. It had long been associated with the reclamation of unused lands or wastes. This particular usage derived from the Anglo-Norman concept of waste land, which signified not only an uncultivated terrain such as the Fens but also land inhabited by few or no people.¹³

Prospective lands of colonization were also described as “empty” or “virgin,” rich in abundant resources but void of inhabitants, or else sparsely populated by nomadic peoples who were too primitive to effectively harness the land’s potential wealth. Arguments of this sort had been used to buttress European claims of the right of conquest and settlement since at least the earliest English settlements along the eastern seaboard of North America. Early settler claims rested initially on a mixture of religious and economic imperatives.¹⁴ The task of cultivating the soil was seen as part of the extension of the Lord’s kingdom, a providential sign of England’s chosen status as the true defender of Godly reformation. Early colonists drew a parallel between “taming the waste,” by establishing new gardens and enclosures, and pacifying the “spiritual wilderness” of the heathen by bringing him into the world of Christian civilization.¹⁵ They also based their claims to the land on the Roman legal principle of res nullius, which defined all “empty things”—including unoccupied lands—as the common property of all, the fruits of which became the property of the first persons to make such terrain a “betterment” by mixing their labor with it. Perhaps the most well-known exposition of this kind comes from John Locke, who argued in his Second Treatise of Government that “whatsoever [a man] tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoiled, that was his peculiar right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed, and make use of, the cattle and product was also his. But if either the grass of his inclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his inclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other.” It’s revealing that Locke chose to disparage, as the most fitting example of this lesson, the supposed misuse of nature by Native Americans, “who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; who nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i.e. a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy.”¹⁶ The image of America as a resource-rich yet sparsely populated wilderness, inhabited by peoples who were unwilling to improve the land or were indeed incapable of doing so, served to ideologically render Native Americans as savages, nomadic hunters with no natural right to the lands they occupied. They roamed over these vast tracts rather than actually inhabiting them. Their subjugation and displacement by those who would plant, enclose, and improve the land was thus grounded on both biblical authority and natural law theory.

The wedding of agrarian improvement to the imperial mission reached its apogee during the long struggle against Revolutionary France, when both the monarchy and the landed classes sought to reinvigorate the image of the Crown and the reach of government through an expansion of state ritual, power, and efficiency.¹⁷ Under the pressures of popular discontent at home and the threat of invasion from across the Channel, Pitt the Younger and his Tory associates embarked upon a program of centralization and consolidation of the British state. A whole series of innovations were introduced, including the creation of a new financial and taxation system, the beginnings of a permanent civil service, and the expansion of bureaucratic authority and expertise through the formation of numerous administrative boards. Through the Board of Agriculture, which was established in 1793, the government sought to stimulate production by providing grants for the extension of arable land, collecting statistics on production, population, and land tenures, and disseminating knowledge of new farming techniques.¹⁸ The enlargement of state power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was even more impressive overseas, where a massive expansion of British imperial suzerainty not only opened the way for the creation of new colonies of settlement in the southern hemisphere but also ushered in new forms of imperial rule in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, South Asia, Southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.¹⁹ Indeed, enclosure at home and colonial expansion abroad were deemed moral and necessary, and both received patronage from the Crown in the half-century following the American Revolution.

What made this “second” British Empire distinctive were the ideological currents of the Enlightenment. The doctrine of improvement gave its adherents faith and confidence in their possession of new modes of knowledge and new abilities to shape and manipulate nature to their will. Early nineteenth-century advocates of imperial expansion and settlement in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa often described these “new lands” as vacant grasslands, inhabited only by a thin scattering of backward and largely nomadic peoples whose low level of specialization and technology prevented them from effectively occupying the land and producing valuable agricultural commodities.²⁰ It was both the right and duty of Europeans to colonize and develop the resources of these previously unused or underutilized areas of the world. The spread of European ideas, goods, capital, and settlement was legitimated as the most sound and natural way to develop the material forces of these regions. Although local ecological factors such as low rainfall or the absence of domestic animals had historically kept population densities low in these regions, it is also true that smallpox, venereal disease, and other infections introduced by Europeans—and often outrunning them—swept through the previously isolated indigenous populations, reducing their numbers by as much as a third or even a half.²¹

Thus, the arrival and spread of European colonists in these areas was facilitated, whether by design or chance, by a dramatic driving out of nomadic peoples and their way of life. The path lay open for those Europeans who settled these new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction Expertise, Development, and the State at the Climax of Empire
• Chapter 1. Setting the Terms of the Debate: Science, the State, and the “New Imperialism”
• Chapter 2. Developing the “Imperial Estate”: Early Patronage and Pessimism for Colonial Scientific Research and Technical Assistance, 1895–1914
• Chapter 3. Science for Development: The Expansion of Colonial Agricultural Research and Advisory Networks, 1914–35
• Chapter 4. The “Human Side” of Development: Trusteeship and the Turn to “Native” Health and Education, 1918–35
• Chapter 5. View from the Field: Rethinking Colonial Agricultural and Medical Knowledge between the Wars, 1920–40
• Chapter 6. View from Above: The Consolidation of Knowledge and the Reorganization of the Colonial Office, 1935–45
• Chapter 7. Triumph of the Expert: Development, Environment, and the “Second Colonial Occupation,” 1945–60
• Conclusion Postcolonial Consultants, Agrarian Doctrines of Development, and the Legacies of Late Colonialism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index