Beyond colonialism: continuity, change and the modern development project

ABSTRACT

The history of ideas about development has its roots in mercantilist globalisation, imperialism and colonial ethnography. Progress was framed in the Enlightenment dichotomy of traditional versus modern, and our thinking about transitions from agrarian societies was informed by the Russian debates over extracting rural surpluses to underpin industrial growth. Development as a replication of Western transitions was subsequently critiqued with the “dependista” argument that advanced capitalist countries were “underdeveloping” poorer, ex-colonial ones. Such modes of production and structural analyses still provided alibis for elite misbehaviour, however. Recent post-modern development theory emphasises actor-oriented explanations and heralds a pluralisation of cosmologies, challenging hegemonic Western conceptions.

RÉSUMÉ

L’histoire des idées sur le développement puise ses origines dans la globalisation mercantile, l’impérialisme et l’ethnographie coloniale. L’idée de progrès a été façonnée par la dichotomie des Lumières opposant le traditionnel au moderne, et notre réflexion sur les transitions des sociétés agraires s’est nourrie des débats russes sur l’extraction des surplus agricoles pour soutenir la croissance du secteur industriel. On a par la suite critiqué le développement comme reproduction du mode occidental de transformation économique avec l’argument des théoriciens de la dépendance selon lequel les pays capitalistes avancés « sous-développaient » les plus pauvres, anciennes colonies. Les analyses structuralistes ont un temps fourni des alibis aux élites des pays dit sous-développés pour leur méfaits. Les théories récentes post-modernes du développement mettent en avant des explications axées sur les acteurs et révèlent une pluralité des cosmologies qui remettent en cause les conceptions hégémoniques occidentales.

KEYWORDS:

• Development theory
• colonialism
• agrarian transition
• dependency
• United Kingdom

Notes on contributor

Geof Wood is Professor Emeritus of International Development, University of Bath. He served as Dean of Faculty in 2005–2008; Head of the Department of Economics and International Development in 2000–2005; and founder-director of the university’s Institute for International Policy Analysis (IFIPA) in 1998–2005. A sociologist with a regional focus on South Asia, Wood has published widely on rural development and natural resource management, social policy and social mobilisation, based on extensive fieldwork. He was President of the UK Development Studies Association in 2011–2014.

Notes

1. The social anthropologist F. G. Bailey (1969) famously shifted his focus from Khond villages in Orissa, India, towards behaviour in US university committees, drawing upon his Strategems and Spoils.

2. The second president of post-apartheid South Africa after Nelson Mandela.

3. A vice-president of the World Bank before retiring and moving to the Gates Foundation.

4. My initial fieldwork was in North Bihar, India (1971–1972), then from 1974 to today in Bangladesh, in Tamil Nadu, India in 1977–1978 and in Pakistan in 1993–2010.

5. I discuss Dudley Seers later in this essay. For the others’ profiles, I suggest Google searches.

6. Henry Bernstein was another “minority” colleague.

7. The “scramble for Africa” is often understood in these terms (Pakenham 1990).

8. As a colonial officer, Darling upgraded canal infrastructure to the plains of the Punjab for large-scale gravity flow irrigation, enabling huge expansion of wheat production in particular (Darling 1925).

9. For a literary portrayal, see Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned (1935) and Harvest on the Don (1960).

10. “Work rate” here refers to how much land is brought into production, requiring longer hours of work to cultivate.

11. The founding of the Journal of Peasant Studies and Teodor Shanin’s reader, Peasants and Peasant Societies (1971).

12. Distinctively, apartheid South Africa represented a case of internalising “us” and “them”, with its Bantustan strategy.

13. A term coined mischievously by Raymond Apthorpe.

14. The East India Company spread its occupation of India primarily through three Presidencies: Bengal, Madras and Bombay, each with a Governor General. After the British government took direct control, following the 1857 Mutiny, these Presidencies were retained until the turn of the century.

15. There were many more. See Lewis, Rodgers, and Woolcock (2008) and its appendix for a list of “development” fiction.

16. Recently a colleague at University of Bath, now in Perth, Australia.

17. Need for Achievement (N-Ach) refers to an individual's desire for significant accomplishment, mastering of skills, control or high standards. McClelland (1961) demonstrated that individuals in a society can be grouped into high achievers and low achievers based on their N-Ach scores.

18. This has been a debate within the UK Development Studies Association.

19. Hilferding published Finance Capital in 1910, and Lenin referred to it heavily in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916. Hilferding argues that the global concentrations of finance capital commanded the production and trading of primary commodities internationally with unequal outcomes, and Lenin argued that capitalism has to expand its reach to survive and overcome the internal contradictions of capitalism within bounded economies. In that sense both rejected the implications of Rosa Luxemburg’s “under-consumption” thesis in undermining capitalism in bounded economies. These theories set the scene for understanding capitalism as a global phenomenon in which exploitation and the appropriation of surplus value occurred between countries with unequal resource endowments rather than just within them.

20. See in particular the Haslemere Declaration Group (HDG) (1968).

21. The Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath received a large grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a programme of study on Wellbeing in Developing Countries (2002–2007). See Gough and McGregor (2007).

22. The preoccupations with inequality have by no means disappeared, with headlines about a few super-rich with more wealth than half the world’s population. The current understanding is that while countries are becoming less unequal between themselves, they are becoming more unequal internally, with alienating and potentially millenarian political consequences as a function of insecurity. Certainly this proposition challenges many earlier assumptions in development studies, and reinforces the shift towards “international development” and globalisation (see Stiglitz 2002). Some inequality writing has hit the headlines: Tilly (1999), Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) and Piketty (2014), for example.

23. This is in my view an improved concept to “capabilities”. See Wood (2015).