Chapter 4 - National Welfare and Colonial Development

Summary

INTRODUCTION

By distinguishing between good stock – the enfranchised, skilled worker – and bad stock – the urban residuum – the National Insurance Act of 1911 institutionalized the eugenicist distinction between deserving and undeserving stock. In this chapter I explore the further racialization of the deserving/undeserving distinction through debates over colonial development and national welfare from fin de siècle to the Second World War. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that a quintessentially “national” arrangement, Britain’s “welfare state”, was actually bound up in imperial determinants that racialized those deserving and undeserving of social security and welfare.

In the first part of the chapter, I discuss how the 1867 Reform Act prompted a re-narration of the English genus such that organized labour could be considered amongst its “little platoons”. I show how those who supported labour’s advance argued that the provincial and patriarchal roots of nineteenth-century friendly societies had provided labour cooperation with the spirit of self-help, that is, of orderly independence. I then turn to debates over poor law reform between the Charity Organization Society and the Fabians. At stake was the viability of transplanting labour’s cooperative spirit from its provincial wellsprings into an unforgiving urban environment, there to improve the character of the residuum. I demonstrate that central to these debates was the tension between the personalized nature of cooperative enterprise and the impersonalized nature of eugenicist interventions organized on a national scale.

In the second part of the chapter I turn to Britain’s colonies. There, labour’s cooperative spirit was looked upon with far greater suspicion. I detail how some Fabians initially turned towards the Caribbean and there identified the cooperative spirit in rural smallholdings outside of the plantation complex. These observations were then generalized into a policy for colonial development, which encouraged self-ownership via smallhold farming in opposition to the dependencies created by working on large plantations and in extractive industries. I chart how the latter model came to ultimately predominate in the interwar period.