Revolutions in Sovereignty by Philpott Daniel;

Author:Philpott, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2001-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Colonial Development: The Postwar Shift in the Ideal

After World War II, Britain came to advocate developing its colonies economically, a concept to accompany progressive political development and gradualness in its imperial ideal. Cabinet officials—prime ministers, foreign secretaries, colonial secretaries, and defense ministers—espoused this combination with remarkable continuity, from the Labour government of Clement Attlee (1945–1951), through to the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill (1951–1955), Anthony Eden (1955–1957), and Harold Macmillan (1957–1963).12 Colonial development became institutionalized in several bureaus, a policy that officials adopted, espoused, and promoted. In initiating the policy, the Labour cabinet was strongly influenced by the Colonial Fabian Bureau, an independent socialist lobby growing out of the previous generation’s Fabian movement of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Though socialist, the bureau was not strongly anti-imperialist. It espoused an ideology of “modernising imperialism,” calling for the economic improvement and gradual political development of the colonies while maintaining them under imperial rule for the foreseeable future.13

This ideal applied mostly to Africa, but also to those parts of Asia outside India, Pakistan, Palestine, Burma, and Ceylon, which were nowhere close to independence. The epicenter of developmental imperialism was the Labour Colonial Office, the ministry charged with overseeing colonial policy. The Secretary and his close subordinates proclaimed it enthusiastically, charging it to the officials of the office. In a 1948 memo written by H. T. Bourdillon, the head of the Malayan Department, we find heady words about colonial development. He calls it a “gigantic experiment, surpassing in importance any of the much publicised experiments indulged in by the Soviet Russians or by anybody else. . . . In this concept of the evolving Commonwealth I see the boldest stroke of political idealism which the world has yet witnessed, and on by far the grandest scale.”14 From early 1946 on, there were calls for a “redefinition, redirection and broadening of the goals of African administration,” a rethinking that was carried out under the direction of the Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Colonial Office memos of the period show a massive policy review, the organization of an African Colonial Governors’ conference to promote ideas for development, the bureaucratic reorganization of the Colonial Office to include an African division and an African Studies Branch, and a widespread commitment to colonial development.15 The goal of the reorganization was, as one official wrote in a July 1948 memorandum on the “re-orientation of the Colonial Office,” to make the office more of a “thinking and planning department on a worldwide scale,” becoming “far less Auditor-General, Home Office, Agriculture, Town and Country Planning,” and “far more the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defense, M15 and Economic Policy Committee.”16

These were inspired ideas, urgent and ambitious. They led to economic development schemes, designed to bring colonies “to the point where they are able economically to sustain the financial burdens of self-government and to stand on their own in the world economy.”17 The phrasing points to an important Colonial Office tenet: economic and political development would go together. Again, though, the watchword was gradualness.

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