Triumph of the expert
Subtitle: Agrarian doctrines of development and the legacies of British colonialism
By: Joseph Morgan Hodge
Series: Ohio University Press series in ecology and history
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9780821417171; 9780821417188
Subjects: Agriculture and state -- Colonies -- Great Britain -- History; Rural development -- Colonies -- Great Britain -- History; Imperialism and science; Great Britain -- Colonies -- Economic policy -- History
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [361]-394) and index