Imperialism

Imperialism is typically characterized as one country imposing its control over another territory, including the subjugation of the indigenous peoples, the attempt to establish cultural hegemony, and the development of unequal economic relations. The term gained currency in political discourse in the nineteenth century, but its use after Lenin has been principally pejorative, and focused on the creation of formal and informal “empires” by Western European powers and the United States in the decades after 1870. The paradigmatic imperial power was Great Britain, which, in the grand era of empires at the turn of the twentieth century, had the largest formal empire by land area, and on which famously the “sun never set,” plus significant spheres of influence in many other countries. In historical studies, the diversity of empires and imperial power relations has meant that the deployment of the term has been problematic and contested; however, its continued currency demonstrates its value descriptively and analytically.

The term “colonialism” in imperial history is strangely of later vintage, only being adopted by scholars from the 1950s and, interestingly, coincident with the end of formal imperialism as colonial territories gained political independence. “Colony” and “colonial” have a very long history, with most uses showing continuity with its origins as an estate, settlement, or community in a new part of the Roman Empire. Before the eighteenth century, the term was best known as applying to the North American colonies of European settlement and the slave plantations of the West Indies. In the struggles for independence in the Americas, “colonial” assumed negative associations of societies that were dependent, derivative, and dominated, a position to be reversed by achieving independence. This critical connotation remained and gained currency with the emergence of independence movements in colonial territories in the twentieth century, which rejected the legitimacy of annexing of territories and the creation of relations of dependency based on the exploitation of resources and labor that had been established by force, economic policies, and cultural hegemony.Footnote ¹³

Imperialism took its classic modern form in the second half of the nineteenth century when Britain, France, and other Western European nations as well as the United States expanded their empires territorially, annexing unclaimed areas of Africa, Asia, South America, and Oceania in the context of the further internationalization of industrial capitalism. By this time, there were broadly three types of colonies. First, there were those, like Canada and Australia, where Europeans had settled in lands, typically with temperate or continental climates that had seemed un- or underpopulated, where the indigenous population, typically hugely reduced in number since European settlement, had been pushed to marginal lands, where they had a precarious existence. Second, there were colonies, like India and Algeria, where a small number of Europeans ruled, by force and negotiation, large populations with developed cultures and economies. Third, there were colonies, like the newly annexed ones in Africa, which were mostly tropical, with indigenous populations seen to be “primitive” or “backward,” and which were said to constitute “undeveloped estates.” European rule was justified variously by the economic imperative of the development of resources and markets, the “civilizing mission” to bring Christianity and modernity, and a mandate for social development and welfare. At the same time, the major industrial nations developed “informal empires,” particularly in Latin America in politically independent countries that had previously formed parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Private business interests established modes of controlling a crucial sector of the economy, which brought power and influence without direct political control.Footnote ¹⁴

Science and “Constructive” Imperialism, 1870–1914

Emblematic of the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century was the “Scramble for Africa” amongst European countries. At the Berlin Conference in 1885, “spheres of influence” were agreed, which precipitated the annexation of territories as colonies and the formation of local administrations, with military support if needed, to establish power over indigenous peoples and their lands. The boundaries of the new colonies were often in areas unexplored by Europeans, a situation most obvious in the straight lines used for boundaries of many North African colonies, and were driven by political rivalry rather than obvious economic opportunities. Eric Hobsbawm observed that “at the end of the nineteenth century the economic case for annexing large tracts of jungle, bush and desert was not overwhelming,” but there were expectations that mining and agriculture would be developed to supply European industry and consumers, and in the longer term markets for European manufactures.Footnote ¹⁵ In this context, European imperial governments saw science as a means to discover and then develop the natural resources of their new colonies. The amateur explorer, driven by curiosity and adventure, was to be replaced by the professional scientist and engineer with the expertise to survey, assess, and advise on the exploitation of natural resources. The clearest statement of this view was in the policy of “constructive imperialism” announced by the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in 1895, which looked to science to lead the exploitation of the “undeveloped estates” of the Empire. He was thinking mainly about Africa, but the policy seemed relevant to the whole Empire, including long-established colonies.

There were questions about how this new deployment of science would be organized. What was the appropriate balance between central, imperial scientific agencies in Europe, close to centers of science research and education, and scientists attached to colonial administrations at the periphery, working in the local physical and cultural environment? Would the training in the natural sciences given at European universities be adaptable, transferable, and applicable to colonial, mostly tropical, environments? These questions were novel for the new African colonies, but had already been answered for British India, as seen in the development of its Geological Survey and in the work of the Imperial Forestry Department.Footnote ¹⁶ Geology, because of its links with mineral resources such as coal, was identified as a key feature of post-1860s imperial science. Geologists had become increasingly conscious of their possible role in exploiting the mineral potential of India and began to undertake studies along similar lines to those pursued in Europe.Footnote ¹⁷ Britain’s leading geologist, Roderick Murchison, advocated the exploration of the mineral resources in colonies and in the “informal empire.”Footnote ¹⁸ Robert A. Stafford has argued that British geologists played a “sub-imperialist” role in their efforts to extend mineralogical research to the colonies.Footnote ¹⁹ This role was evident in their “desire for new data, new careers, new satisfactory conquests, a new voice in administrative affairs – meshing with the needs of the imperial government” in the formation of organizations like the Geological Survey of India.Footnote ²⁰

One of the key themes of imperial environmental history has been the destruction of the existing ecologies of the tropical colonies through the impact of colonial agriculture, plantation, and animal husbandry, which historian John M. MacKenzie has described as a narrative of “Ecological Apocalypse.”Footnote ²¹ Historians such as Helge Kjekshus have shown how colonialism in East Africa from the 1890s led to a series of environmental and medical disasters.Footnote ²² Clearing of forests led to droughts, and old pastoral systems and lifestyles were destroyed. Others have argued that major ecological changes resulted from the combined influences of capitalist agriculture, industrialization, and colonial administration. In Madagascar, French colonialism from 1896 and the introduction of coffee cultivation led to a massive decrease in tropical forest cover. The growth of coffee plantations also led to an increase in settlements of laborers, who cleared forests to make space for shifting cultivation and were forced to live in insanitary conditions.Footnote ²³ For India, in the book The Fissured Land, Ram Guha and Madhav Gadgil show how colonial rule and the quest for teak required for railways and ships destroyed the precolonial balance between humans and the environment. This process continued in the twentieth century with other major development projects.Footnote ²⁴ However, there is an alternative narrative in which historians have argued that colonial settlers also brought with them notions of environmental awareness and a desire to preserve ecosystems and landscape.Footnote ²⁵ The colonial environmental policies, they argue, bore imprints of this ecological consciousness.

The role of indigenous populations in deforestation is a complex issue. In 1996, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach challenged the claim that large parts of tropical Africa had suffered from deforestation, due to increasing human settlement in these regions.Footnote ²⁶ They suggested that forest cover, particularly in the Kissidougou area of Guinea in West Africa, had not disappeared significantly, but that people learned to live in “mosaic” patterns of forests and agricultural land. This challenged the earlier understanding of Kissidougou’s landscape as degraded from the pristine forests of the past, and also highlighted the fallacy of Western forestry policies, which sought to restrict agricultural and husbandry practices within designated and protected forest regions. According to Fairhead and Leach, this stemmed from a fundamental misconception about the coexistence of “natural and social phenomenon” in these regions.Footnote ²⁷

Historians of south Asia have suggested that the same misconception guided the policies of modern forestry in colonial India, which sought to exclude forest dwellers, in the pursuit of pristine, protected, tropical forests. Traditionally, in India, large sections of the rural population depended on forests for their everyday sustenance. The various traditional customs and practices allowed this use of forest resources. In other words, tropical forests were not “pristine”; they were used and managed by the local inhabitants. However, imperial forestry policy was focused on halting what officials saw as deforestation and, led by German experts, introduced the notion of “scientific forestry” into India.Footnote ²⁸ Peoples who had lived in certain forest regions were expelled and large tracts were turned into “reserves,” to be used only for timber production for the colonial economy.Footnote ²⁹ This alienation of people from their forests continued in the postcolonial period and led to significant resistances, such as the “Chipko movement” in northern India.Footnote ³⁰

The creation of science-based agricultural agencies for and in the Empire came later, and in the case of India not until 1905. This was because of the prior success of the networks of botanical gardens in exchanging plants and encouraging the cultivation of crops in new settings. At the center of the two largest empires were the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris and Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. In the first half of the nineteenth century, French biologists, influenced by the ideas of Lamarck on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, were heavily invested in acclimatization, the process of adapting plants and animals to thrive and become economically valuable in new habitats. It was not just a French enterprise. At the end of the nineteenth century there were over fifty acclimatization societies across the world, and it was a central feature of the work of most botanical gardens. Acclimatization was also practiced with animals, which extended to trying to produce a mule–zebra hybrid that would be disease resistant and able to serve as a draught animal in South Africa.Footnote ³¹ Michael A. Osborne has argued that acclimation was the “paradigmatic colonial science,” taking his lead from Auguste Hardy, head of the Jardin d’Essai, who wrote in 1860 that “the whole of colonization is a vast deed of acclimatization.”Footnote ³² Osborne writes that acclimatization was promoted “as the incarnation of a cooperative and humanistic civilizing mission” and “as a utilitarian activity that promised economic betterment … for Europeans.”Footnote ³³ Colonial peoples were assumed to benefit, but only secondarily. However, in the case of French North Africa, Osborne argues that benefits were in fact one-sided as “the extension of export agriculture … resulted in diminished diets and famine for the Algerian peoples.”Footnote ³⁴ Most acclimatization projects failed in their own terms as scientists struggled with ecological complexities, with their lack of knowledge of novel organisms and environments – a situation not helped by their dismissal of the practices and ideas of local peoples – and with the economic, political, and cultural conditions in which they worked.

For the British Empire, Kew Gardens was at the center of a network of botanists and plant collectors, described as “a great exchange house” of plants of potential agricultural and horticultural value.Footnote ³⁵ Its greatest economic success was the development of rubber cultivation in the Malay Peninsula.Footnote ³⁶ In the early 1870s, the India Office had recommended the collection of rubber plants from Brazil and their distribution to British Asian colonies. Kew dispatched an expedition, which rushed seeds back to London, where they were nurtured before being sent on to Sri Lanka, from where they were distributed, principally to Java and Singapore.Footnote ³⁷ Seeds were grown and plants propagated in botanical gardens, but experiments on how to extract latex efficiently were unsuccessful until the late 1880s. Then, the new Director of the Singapore Botanical Garden, Henry N. Ridley, found a way to remove latex without damaging the tree.Footnote ³⁸ Ridley was later known as “Rubber Ridley” or “Mad Ridley” for his enthusiastic promotion of rubber plantations, an industry that grew rapidly from the 1900s. The botanical garden in the colony continued to be a source of expertise, advising on everything from soil through to processing, including the dangers of monoculture, though this role was taken over by a newly formed Department of Agriculture when Ridley retired in 1912.

The story of rubber in Malaya was important to colonial policy throughout the era of imperialism. It demonstrated how a colony could develop economically by supplying a natural product to industrialized countries. It was based on the principle, which dated back to Sir Walter Raleigh returning from the Americas with the potato, that certain plants would grow better in a new environment where the climate might be more favorable, where there were fewer pests, and where breeders, farmers, and scientists could use their superior knowledge. Moreover, rubber in Malaya was an exemplar of a new type of science-led development, where expert knowledge and experimentation, undertaken locally, had initiated and sustained the expansion of the industry. Ridley’s science was eclectic. He had studied natural sciences at Cambridge and then won a scholarship in geology, before learning economic botany in post at Kew. His work on rubber in Singapore involved analytical investigations, laboratory experiments, and field trials, and once plantations were established, natural product chemistry, plant pathology, and forestry. The scale and relative isolation of such science at the periphery demanded cross- and interdisciplinary work, and gave scientists the space and freedom to innovate. Other crops in other colonies were expected to follow, but there were few similar successes in any of the European empires before the First World War.

In London, the British government created a “Kew for Chemistry” in 1887, the Imperial Institute at the center of the South Kensington cultural complex in London.Footnote ³⁹ The Institute aimed to serve as a commercial clearinghouse and applied research laboratory, housing displays of minerals and natural products from around the Empire, which British entrepreneurs could assess for potential trade or exploitation. It was the paradigmatic central institution, which all colonial governments were invited to support and use. Many colonies, notably India, Australia, and Canada, refused to subscribe, claiming that they had their own local facilities and saw no benefit in paying for a remote and unaccountable central institution. This rejection nicely illustrates Roy MacLeod’s notion of a “moving metropolis,” where centers of scientific activity move or are newly created as political, economic, and scientific relations change.Footnote ⁴⁰ With minerals and natural resources, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, India, Australia, and Canada had colleges and universities with the facilities and expertise in applied chemistry that were also more in tune with local conditions, businesses, and peoples.

Medicine had a similar polycentric character. Research and teaching was only centralized in tropical medicine, a specialism established around 1900 in all of the European empires. Its aim in the first instance was to protect colonial officials, settlers, entrepreneurs, and missionaries and then to investigate the novel endemic and epidemic disease problems in the old and new tropical colonies. In the older colonies, medical schools and colleges had been established in the second half of the nineteenth century, teaching students from the local population an essentially Western medicine curriculum. Medical developments in (and for) the colonies of the French Empire illustrate the complexities and variability of center–periphery relations. Michael A. Osborne has recently shown the importance of Bordeaux and Marseille, as well as Paris, from the late nineteenth century as tropical medicine changed from a primarily naval to a military and colonial administrative enterprise.Footnote ⁴¹ Medical schools were established in French North African colonies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The small college in Algiers was founded in 1879 as part of reforms across the country and followed from the administrative position of French overseas territories as départements of the nation. However, colleges were not created in French Indochina until the early twentieth century as distance, climate, and culture were more challenging. The major innovation at this time was the development of overseas Pasteur Institutes, the first of which opened in South East Asia in Saigon in 1891 and Nha Trang in 1895, and in North Africa in Tunis in 1893 and Algiers a year later.Footnote ⁴² The Pasteur Institute in Paris had been founded in 1887, funded by a public subscription to create an institution that would continue Louis Pasteur’s work in microbiology and the development of vaccines. As Pratik Chakrabarti has shown, this represented the convergence of “the imperial idiom of tropical medicine and panacean rhetoric of Pasteurian bacteriology.”Footnote ⁴³

The origins of the overseas Pasteur Institutes were various: the entrepreneurialism of scientists trained in the Pasteurian tradition; the demands of local colonial governments and businesses; and competition with the scientific endeavors of other imperial powers.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the 1900s, the institutes received recognition as the centers of discovery and innovation, with Charles Nicolle’s work on typhus fever in Tunis, and with improvements and adaptations to vaccines.Footnote ⁴⁵ Pasteur Institutes were not confined to the French Empire. The first in India in 1900 was at Kasauli, followed by ten others by 1910.Footnote ⁴⁶ The institutes constituted an informal network, with shared “Pastorian methods” and personnel, with the general goal of improving public health by developing vaccines and providing bacteriological services. They were administratively, financially, and scientifically independent. Each was dependent upon local support and worked on local disease problems. They became centers of bacteriological research of variable range: some specific to a city, but others becoming national and regional hubs of reference and research.

The New Colonialism, 1918–1945

There are four dominant themes in the history of science and imperialism in the interwar period. First, there was the continuing proliferation of scientific centers in colonies and the weakening of central and metropolitan institutions. In India, science and its institutions were more overtly politicized with the development of nationalism and calls for independence.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, in the context of the global economic crisis and the growth of protectionism, a new policy was planned, though not always implemented, of an intensification of scientific efforts to exploit colonies as producers of raw materials and foodstuffs, both for export and to ameliorate local economic problems. In line with wider changes in policy and rhetoric, there was no longer talk of “imperial science,” but of science in and for the development of colonies; in the French empire it was termed “la colonisation rationnelle.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Third, colonial development became linked to the “welfare” of indigenous populations with the aim of improving their nutrition, sanitary conditions, and healthcare, which was in large part a response to political unrest and to ameliorate poor social and economic conditions. Colonial development was still seen primarily as a biological matter, though there was greater investment in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, to better understand and manage colonial subjects. Fourth, innovative interdisciplinary knowledges and practices were created in some colonies, which were facilitated by the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural engagements of scientists at the periphery. Helen Tilley has claimed that in the 1930s European scientists in Africa challenged the authority of established disciplines and, through interdisciplinary working and selective adaptations of “native” knowledge, produced what she has termed “vernacular science.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In India, historians have stressed the processes of “alienation,” “displacement,” and “cultural transformation” through which Indian scientists sought to redefine modern science.Footnote ⁵⁰ They have shown how Orientalist or European ideas were challenged, and a “cultural redefinition” of science took place, with the hope of an alternative tradition of science being established. Gyan Prakash has shown that around 1900, within the emerging popular culture of India, science was challenged, redefined, and absorbed as an indigenous tradition.Footnote ⁵¹ However, this perceived redefinition was based upon both a glorification of indigenous traditions and resistances, and a naïve understanding of cultural redefinition. Knowledge systems, which emerge from a particular geographical and social setting, typically undergo transformations when situated in another context. A closer examination of these various histories of transformation, translation, and redefinition, across colonies and empires, shows that rather than providing clear alternatives to Western ideas of science, they tended to reiterate European notions of nature, rationality, and truth through indigenous imageries and language. In most cases, what they presented as indigenous or vernacular tradition was itself an invented and modern one. Therefore, the alternative trajectories of modernity and development through science that these scientists prescribed remained in important ways derivatives of Western science.Footnote ⁵²

In the interwar period there was a new intensity in efforts to develop agriculture in colonial territories.Footnote ⁵³ Science-led policies were still to the fore, with agricultural officers taking over from botanical garden staff and offering more advice on husbandry through the establishment of experimental stations and extension services. In many colonies there was little prospect of Europeans investing in plantations, and hence, attention shifted to encouraging the local farmers to grow export crops. This development was said to have the dual benefit of supplying industrial economies, as well as drawing famers and associated workers into the market economy. The policy assumed, wrongly as it turned out in most areas, that the greater productivity and rewards of export crops would allow the local population to grow or buy sufficient food crops. In his work on agricultural science in French colonies, Christophe Bonneuil concluded that scientists fostered the “technocratization of the colonial administration” and construction of colonial development as a “technical problem.” Bonneuil quotes the British biologist E. B. Worthington, who wrote in 1931 that Africa was a “fruitful field in history for experiment concerning the place of expert scientific knowledge,” which saw the formulation of a common technocratic, developmentalist policy across empires, sites, crops, and agricultural systems.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike in the British Empire, in France there was a drive in the 1920s to develop metropolitan institutes and a “collective effort to avoid the mistakes of improvisation and the necessity of sharing tasks.” However, this came up against the need to understand specific local economic, political, and environmental conditions, and in the 1930s there was a shift away from centralization towards developing local “colonial sciences” at the periphery in new centers that aimed to serve other colonies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Bonneuil characterized the new enterprise as “development by experiment,” as colonial agricultural officers were dealing with crops, environments, and cultures about which they had much to learn.Footnote ⁵⁶ Officers established experimental stations to disseminate advice and seeds for new crops, but they still faced difficulties in adaptation and adoption. This led scientists to narrow their focus to the “technical,” as in Senegal, where failure to change local practices in the cultivation of peanuts led scientists to restrict their work to improving seed types.Footnote ⁵⁷

Other historians have taken up the notion of Africa as a development “laboratory.” In his studies of British colonial science policy in the interwar period, Joseph Hodge has shown the many shifts in policy and practice.Footnote ⁵⁸ Through the 1920s, the policy of “constructive imperialism” emphasized attracting investment and encouraging European entrepreneurs, supported by efforts to improve transport and communication. These policies were complemented by a continuation of “science for development” policies, where development was principally conceived as a biological enterprise. To provide the experts needed, an Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA) was established in Trinidad in the West Indies in 1922. Its role was to train British biology graduates to serve in agricultural departments in the growing number of colonial technical departments. Tropical agriculture was constructed primarily as an export-crop-focused, “universal” science that provided students with the knowledge and skills to work in any colony across the empire. Once in post, officers with this largely technical knowledge were confronted with the economic, cultural, political, and environmental complexities of their district, many of which covered large areas and had great diversity. Technical officers also had to work with political and other technical staff and, given the British policy of “indirect rule,” with local political leaders and institutions. They had to adapt their supposed universal tropical agricultural science to local circumstances, which led to a proliferation of experimental and demonstration facilities, along with measures to deal with novel plant diseases and insect pests, such as locusts. They also had to determine what kind of agricultural system “worked,” taking cognizance of different systems of land tenure, social relations, cultural practices, and local markets.

In the 1930s Hodge points to “the emergence of relatively autonomous colonial scientific communities centered around regional institutions and networks,” which saw the ICTA in a new regional role, and the establishment of rubber and tea research institutes in south Asian colonies.Footnote ⁵⁹ The economic depression reduced colonial revenues, and while the rhetoric emphasized meeting the economic crisis with stronger inter-imperial relations, the reality was that scientists in the colonies were increasingly isolated from the metropole and developed regional networks and loyalties. The characteristic colonial scientific activity remained research, development, and extension work in the biological sciences. Policy initiatives promoted more systematic exploitation of existing systems, the expansion of plantations, and the production of cash crops by local farmers. An example of the complexities they faced can be seen in the responses to diseases of cocoa trees in the Gold Coast. There was a policy divide between scientists who emphasized an ecological approach, emphasizing conservation, and other scientists who favored a reductionist, disease-centered, “cutting out” policy.Footnote ⁶⁰ The ecological approach was favored by colonial forestry officers who argued that loss of forests led to climate change and desiccation of the soil, and made cocoa trees more susceptible to disease, all of which reduced yields. African cocoa producers largely shared their views. However, researchers at the new coffee research station at Tafo in the Gold Coast, supported by agricultural officers, suggested that the main issue was the spread of the virus of swollen shoot disease and the solution was removing and replacing infected trees. Needless to say, the policy of “cutting out” was resisted by farmers, leading to riots and disturbances from 1948, when the nationalist movement took up the issue; they anticipated that alternative solutions would be developed after independence.Footnote ⁶¹

Scientific practice in and for British African colonies in the interwar period was systematically reviewed in Lord Hailey’s African Survey, published in 1938.Footnote ⁶² Significantly, it was accompanied by an equally lengthy review of scientific research in Africa, written by E. B. Worthington.Footnote ⁶³ These two studies are the focus of Helen Tilley’s Africa as a Living Laboratory, which argues that colonial agricultural, medical, and other officers, along with natural and social scientists working in Africa, both supported and critiqued colonial development policies.Footnote ⁶⁴ In agriculture, they continued to promote the growing of cash crops for export, while at the same time warning that it led to soil erosion, overgrazing, and the proliferation of pests and diseases, and pointing to the economic and ecological risks in the reliance on single crops.Footnote ⁶⁵ Tilley shows that scientists and technical officers increasingly turned their attention to supporting the growth of food crops and accepted that they had much to learn from the local cultivation practices. This shift led to the creation of Tilley’s notion of “vernacular sciences,” hybrids of Western and African knowledge and practice, framed ecologically against biological reductionism, that were interdisciplinary across the natural and social sciences, and combined expert and lay knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁶ These hybrids were seen across the agricultural and medical sciences, and one example that links these was the “discovery” of colonial malnutrition. Metropolitan experts and government officials constructed this as a technical problem of unbalanced diets, whereas locally it was also seen as arising from the neglect of food crops in colonial development policy and lack of interest in local dietaries.Footnote ⁶⁷

Tilley also explores race in the biological sciences and anthropology.Footnote ⁶⁸ Her central argument is that scientists were ambivalent about race: in part because it was a taken-for-granted category, but more importantly because their new work and experience undermined race as a category of human difference. In the debates over education in Kenya in the early 1930s, while not accepting equality between the African and European mind, scientists argued that indigenes should be given, and would benefit from, schooling. In anthropology during the interwar period, the dominant approach moved from physical to social anthropology, and from diffusionism (the spread and progress of cultures) to functionalism (how cultures were structured and operated). Tilley shows how the findings and advice of social anthropologists on how indigenous societies “worked” were increasingly used by colonial administrators and other officials to inform their actions. Moreover, by showing the context-appropriate “rationality” of African belief systems and social relations, social scientists questioned the moral and cultural authority of colonial rule. Lyn Schumaker’s study of the work of the Manchester School of anthropology in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) makes similar points about the context-specific and increasingly critical character of anthropologists’ writing.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although she does not use the term, her work can also be seen as illustrating “vernacular science,” as she demonstrates how knowledge was made, not just by researchers but co-produced with local networks of assistants and by the African subjects who the anthropologists spoke with, lived with, and befriended.

The remaking of colonial development policy in the 1930s was increasingly also shaped by political unrest in many colonies. The wider context was the growth of nationalism and calls for independence in India. Hodge observes that amongst the experts in the colonial technical services there was a “candid reckoning … over the mistakes of past colonial interventions and the consequences of unfettered exploitation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ These problems became more pressing with the exigencies of the Second World War and led to the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, 1940. The key change was the explicit addition of “welfare” to the more economically focused 1929 Act. Nonetheless, as Hodge has shown, science remained a lynchpin in development policy, as the new Acts saw “a new commitment … to integrated planning and coordination, led by a bureaucracy that was increasingly scientific.”Footnote ⁷¹

Development and Welfare, 1945–2000

The scale and ambition of the support of the economic and social development of the colonies of colonial powers increased massively after 1945.Footnote ⁷² Science became an even more pivotal ideological and practical element in development policies, with economic and social change being catalyzed by what became known as “technical assistance.” The impact of science on military and civil technologies during the Second World War fostered greater optimism about its peacetime potential, which was captured in the title of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report for the United States government: Science, The Endless Frontier.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, in 1949, President Harry S. Truman announced his government’s Point Four Program, which he described as “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In many ways, this was “constructive imperialism” for a new age, now cast as “know how” and “technological innovation.” Many of Truman’s “underdeveloped areas” were colonial territories of European powers, and there was explicit critique of “The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit.”Footnote ⁷⁵ While the motives of the Point Four Program were in part humanitarian, they were also part of American Cold War policies to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and challenge the world role of Britain and France. Nonetheless, the steep change in colonial development efforts of the European powers was in line with post-war reconstruction efforts across the world, while also helping the economic recovery of industrialized countries and meeting the challenge of nationalism and calls for independence.

In the post-war years, science in and for Europe’s ever shrinking number of colonies was in competition with the new international organizations for health, agriculture, and culture created by the United Nations (UN). The League of Nations had been active in health in the 1920s and 1930s, but the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), which began work in 1948, had more ambitious aims and support. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) had started three years earlier, with the aim of combating hunger by increasing production and productivity. Tellingly, its first head was the Scottish nutritionist John Boyd Orr, who had been a key figure in the identification of colonial malnutrition, while the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which aimed to promote international collaboration to foster understanding and promote security, was headed by the British biologist Julian Huxley. Huxley had also been active in British colonial science, especially through his book Africa View (1931), which promoted conservation and wildlife reserves, tacitly reinforcing the notion that colonial development and welfare were primarily “biological.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The best-known and now notorious post-war project of technical assistance to promote colonial development was the scheme to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).Footnote ⁷⁷ The idea came from a senior figure in Unilever, a company that had longstanding investment in palm oil in West Africa and Latin America. The scheme promised to link the interests of the company, in cheap margarine and other goods for the British consumer, with the development of the “empty lands” of the colony. A plan was drawn up on the advice of John Wakefield, a colonial agricultural officer with years of experience in the colony, and also included ambitious schemes of public health to prevent tropical diseases and promote welfare. It was given the go ahead by the British government in 1947. Four years later it was abandoned having failed to reach its production targets.Footnote ⁷⁸ The scheme has recently been termed a “technocratic dream,” based on inadequate knowledge of ecological conditions, over-optimism about the transferability of agricultural technologies, and failure to link the “technical” to economic and social issues.Footnote ⁷⁹ Similar, though in time much better informed and planned approaches were followed by the British Colonial Office across the sciences, in what Sabine Clarke points to as “a strong technocratic turn in official thinking,” as “Britain gave the activity of research related to the British colonies its highest ever priority.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The foundations of these efforts remained in biological sciences, specifically in agriculture, forestry, soil conservation, public health, and pest control, but expanded to include production and processing technologies, water supplies, and other infrastructure projects.Footnote ⁸¹

Typical of the approaches of the new era, though not initiated by any colonial government, was the “Green Revolution,” a term first used in 1968, but which has come to cover programs of agricultural development in previous colonial territories, which were renamed variously as “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and “Third World” countries.Footnote ⁸² The Green Revolution was based on an old model of the introduction of novel crops, in the form of seed varieties, to new sites, but now backed up by the introduction of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, plus improved irrigation and mechanization, to transform peasant farming in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By avoiding food shortages and their socio-political consequences, the Green Revolution was projected to counter possible “Red Revolutions” that would follow growing Soviet influence in developing countries.Footnote ⁸³ The main agencies involved were philanthropic foundations, initially including the Rockefeller Foundation, which began cooperation with the Mexican government in 1943 to develop new corn varieties.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Foundation’s efforts resulted in the establishment of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in 1963. The Ford Foundation and Kellogg Foundation also supported agricultural research and extension, joining forces with the UNFAO, the World Bank, and large agrochemical companies.Footnote ⁸⁵ Joseph Hodge has shown continuities between the “thinking and practice of late colonial agricultural development” and those of the philanthropic, UN, US, and other agencies of the Green Revolution. In fact, he shows how “British Colonial Expertise” was remobilized with former scientists and technical officers occupying key roles in development projects, where they seemingly embraced top-down, technocratic modernism that had been eschewed by the interwar precursors.Footnote ⁸⁶

Historians have pointed to the continuities in the Green Revolution, not just with colonial science for development policies, but also with the intensification of agricultural production in all countries since the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ In India the new policies were introduced in the context of political independence, economic planning, avoidance of food shortages and famines, and modernization of rural areas. Such efforts built on a colonial heritage.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) was established in 1929 and then radically reorganized in 1965 for achieving India’s self-sufficiency through the Green Revolution.Footnote ⁸⁹ The ICAR developed new strains of high yield value (HYV) seeds, mainly wheat and rice, but also millet and corn. The most noteworthy was the K68 variety for wheat, which – along with the increased use of fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanization – improved yields and overall food supplies. From 1961 to 2000, agricultural productivity kept pace with the near doubling of the Indian population. Over the period, the production of cereals rose from seventy million tons to one hundred and eighty million tons, potatoes from three million tons to twenty million and sugar from six to eighteen million tons.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Green Revolution had seemingly achieved its primary goal of large-scale increase of agricultural productivity to feed India’s population.

However, the Green Revolution has been criticized for creating regional and social disparities and ecological problems. Investments tended only to be made in already favored areas with regular supplies of water, where large inputs of fertilizers could be sourced, and where there was adequate farm credit. It also increased income disparities: higher income growth and reduced incidence of poverty were found in the states where yields increased the most, and lower income growth and little change in the incidence of poverty in other states.Footnote ⁹¹ Vandana Shiva has discussed the interrelationships between agriculture, ecology, and politics, particularly in Punjab.Footnote ⁹² She argues that the “quick fix” promise of large gains in output by the Green Revolution was at the expense of an alternative agricultural strategy that was much more in tune with the environmental knowledge of the peasants and the principles of an egalitarian village-based society. There was also a loss of genetic diversity and reduction in soil fertility, which contributed to economic problems and social and political conflicts. While Shiva’s polemical style often idealizes peasant life, it nevertheless raises an important question about postcolonial science in India in the last century: how do we integrate science with a society that is still predominantly agrarian? Along with that it raises the question of agency and participation of farmers in development projects.

A different view of the Green Revolution has been advanced by Corinna Unger, who stresses that it was shaped by a diversity of opinions, objectives, and ideas about development and welfare, which were promoted by different actors, such as government policy makers, agriculturalists, private companies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and different biotechnological research institutes, as well as peasants and agricultural laborers. Thus, any assessment of its impact needs to take into account this complex relationship of interests and ambitions. While acknowledging the mixed assessments of the benefits of the Green Revolution, Unger notes that few have questioned the need for changes in agricultural practices in postcolonial nations. The challenge remains as to how to increase agricultural productivity and achieve a more equitable distribution of food and other resources in a sustainable way.Footnote ⁹³

Taking a broad and historical view of the role of biotechnologies in postcolonial development, Sheila Jasanoff suggested that its ideas, practices, and products have helped to create and perpetuate a new form of imperialism, with top-down collaborations between multinational corporations and national governments.Footnote ⁹⁴

Conclusion

In recent decades, historians of science and historians of imperialism have recognized that since 1870 science has played a central role in imperial expansion, colonial rule, and postcolonial development. Institutions were established and scientists put to work to address European interests in acclimatization, to facilitate plantation and other export crop agricultural systems, to exploit mineral resources, to improve health and welfare of colonizers and then the colonized, and overall to support colonial political power. Science’s role was also cultural, representing European superiority and legitimating imperial domination across Africa, Asia, and beyond. All areas of science were impacted by this involvement, but especially the biological, environmental, medical, human, and social sciences. The movement of people, ideas, and practices between metropoles and peripheries was two-way. However, the flows were not of equal quality and quantity, and scientists working in colonies spoke of local constraints as often as opportunities. However, their relative autonomy, particularly during the interwar period, allowed them to develop innovative ideas and practices that stemmed in part from greater respect for local conditions and the knowledge of local peoples.

In the years after 1945, with the founding of new international agencies and the development of the Cold War, there was a step change upwards in the scale of science in and for the colonies of Western powers and newly independent states. Perhaps paradoxically, science sometimes became the cornerstone for postcolonial national development plans. Science in newly independent states was to be used to harness the mineral wealth and expand the agricultural productivity to address problems of poverty and malnutrition. One of the problems of science in the modern era, whether in the imperial or the national context, has been its bureaucratization and whether access to its benefits has remained limited. Although indigenous scientific traditions sought to democratize science, in the postcolonial era science was adopted by nation-states for grand technocratic schemes of national development, often referred to as “big science.” These major projects had mixed results. They made important, but uneven contributions to economic and social welfare, while at the same time creating new inequalities and environmental problems. However, science itself has tended to remain confined to elite institutions. Grassroots movements around science, whereby science becomes more accessible to a larger section of the population and would be used by citizens in their everyday lives, would not only benefit society, but also remodel science in more dynamic and inventive ways.