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Industrialisation in Late Colonial Africa: A British Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Larry J. Butler
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Extract

Among the most entrenched criticisms of the record of European colonial rule in Africa is that it discouraged, or actively obstructed, the emergence of diversified colonial and post-colonial economies. Specifically, it is normally argued, the colonial state failed to create the climate in which industrialisation might have been possible. The two basic explanations advanced for this policy of neglect were a desire to ensure that the colonies continued to provide the metropolitan economies with a steady supply of desirable commodities, and a concern to protect the market share of metropolitan exporters. Critics of the colonial legacy, across the ideological spectrum, have often assumed that ‘development’ was a condition which could only be achieved through the process of industrialisation, and that specialisation in commodity production for export could not have been in the colonies' long-term interests. Moreover, in the late colonial period, industrialisation had come to be seen by many as a measure of a state's effective autonomy and economic ‘maturity’, as witnessed by the sustained attempts by many former African colonies to promote their own industrial sectors, often with substantial state involvement or assistance. While it cannot dispute the obvious fact that in most of late colonial Africa, industrialisation was negligible, this paper will offer a refinement of conventional assumptions about the colonial state's attitudes towards this controversial topic. Drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly that pioneer of decolonisation, West Africa, and focusing on the unusually fertile period in colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it will suggest that the British colonial state attempted, for the first time, to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development.

Type
The Late Colonial State
Information
Itinerario , Volume 23 , Issue 3-4 , November 1999 , pp. 123 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1999

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Boahen, A. Adu, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore 1987) 100–103Google Scholar; Howard, R., Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Ghana (London 1978) 15–26Google Scholar; Austen, R., African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London 1987) 181–182Google Scholar; Havinden, M. and Meredith, D., Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London 1993) 159Google Scholar.

2 Fieldhouse, D.K., Black Africa 1945–1980: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development (London 1986) 139–144, 152–157.Google Scholar

3 A fuller discussion of the following theme s can be found in Butler, L.J., Industrialisation and the British Colonial State: West Africa, 1939–1951 (London 1997) passim.Google Scholar

4 Hailey, Lord, An African Survey (Oxford 1938)Google Scholar; Frankel, S.H., Capital Investment in Africa (Oxford 1938)Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Phillips, A., The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London 1989) 156–163Google Scholar, and Clarence-Smith, W.G., ‘The Organisation of “Consent” in British West Africa, 1820s to 1960s’ in: Engels, D. and Marks, S. eds, Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India (London 1994) 55–78Google Scholar.

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7 For example, Public Record Office, Kew (hereafter PRO): CO 554/130/33685/1942, Sir Alan Burns to Lord Moyne, 16 January 1942.

8 Constantine, S., The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London 1984) passim.Google Scholar

9 PRO CO 852/578/6, ‘The Development of Manufacturing Industries’, 27 February 1945. Attempts during the 1930s to secure an agreed policy statement on this question from the Imperial government had proved abortive.

10 PRO CO 852/482/2, draft memorandum by C.Y. Carstairs (Head of Production Department, Economic Division, Colonial Office), ‘The Control of Secondary Industries in the Colonies, with Special Reference to East and West Africa’, 21 November 1943.

11 Robinson, R., ‘Andrew Cohen and the Transfer of Power in Tropical Africa, 1940–1951’ in: Morris-Jones, W.H. and Fischer, G. eds, Decolonisation and After: The British and French Experience (London 1980) 50–72.Google Scholar

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13 Lewis, W.A., Report on Industrialisation and the Gold Coast (Accra 1953).Google Scholar

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15 See, e.g., PRO CO 852/370/12. Hugh Dalton (President, Board of Trade) to Harold Macmillan (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Colonial Office), 15 May 1942. For Lewis' views on this subject, see PRO CO 852/896/1, CEDC(48)32 Annex, A, ‘Colonial Textile Industries: Suggestion by Professor Lewis’, 8 November 1948Google Scholar.

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17 PRO CO 852/504/5, CPP 123(1), 16 February 1942.

18 PRO CO 852/480/11, minute by Sydney Caine, 29 April 1943.

19 PRO CO 852/409/13, ‘U.K. Participation in Empire Secondary Industries’ (no date).

20 See, for example, PRO BT 11/2441, minute by R. Skevington, 22 February 1944.

21 PRO CO 990/2, CEAC(43)5, ‘Social and Economic Planning in the Colonial Empire’, 25 November 1943; CO 852/482/3, minute by Caine, 30 October 1943.

22 Fieldhouse, D., ‘War and the Origins of the Gold Coast Marketing Board, 1939–40’ in: Twaddle, M. ed., Imperialism, the State and the Third World (London 1992) 153–182Google Scholar; Meredith, D., ‘State Controlled Marketing and Economic “Development”: The Case of West African Produce during the Second World War’, Economic History Review, second series XXXIX/1 (1986) 77–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meredith, D., ‘The Colonial Office, British Business Interests and the Reform of Cocoa Marketing in West Africa, 1937–1945’, Journal of African History 29 (1988) 285–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 See, for example, PRO CO 852/58 8 Pt. 1, ‘The Planning of Social and Economic Development in the Colonial Empire’, April 1944, and CO 554/132/33718/1/1943, ‘Post-War Planning for West Africa’ (no date); Lee, J.M. and Petter, M., The Colonial Office, War, and Development Policy: Organisation and the Planning of a Metropolitan Initiative, 1939–1945 (London 1982).Google Scholar

26 See, for example, PRO CO 583/271/30572/1944, minute byA.B. Cohen, 27January 1944.

27 PRO CO 852/505/3, CPP 152(10), ‘Some Aspects of the Flow of Capital into the British Colonies’, circulated 4 August 1942. On the origins of the development corporation idea, and the Colonial Development Corporation, see Buder, , Industrialisation, 159–181Google Scholar; Cowen, M., ‘Early Years of the Colonial Development Corporation: British State Enterprise Overseas during Late Colonialism’, African Affairs 83/330 (1984) 63–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, D.J., The Official History of Colonial Development II: Developing British Colonial Resources, 1945–1951 (London 1980) 320–382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 PRO CO 583/271/30572/1944, note of discussion with Treasury on Nigerian development, 9 November 1944; CO 852/574/7, CDWAC No. 577, ‘Nigeria: Development of the Peasant Textile Industry’, 25July 1944 and F.E.V. Smith (Development Adviser, Nigerian Government) to Frank Samuel (Managing Director, United Africa Company), 21 March 1945; CO 583/288/30572/1948, ‘A Ten-Year Plan of Development and Welfare for Nigeria, 1946’, 30 March 1946. Richards' growing misgivings about the implications of industrialisation are captured in his telegram to the Colonial Office of 11 January 1946 in CO 852/574/10.

29 PRO CO 852/587/9. Enclosure 1 to CEAC(Ind.) (45)21, May 1945; CO 852/574/9, despatch from Sir Alan Burns, 6 February 1945.

30 Hyam, R. ed., British Documents on the End ofEmpire. Series A, Volume 2. The Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951. Part II Economics and International Relations (London 1992)Google Scholar; Hyam, R., ‘Africa and the Labour Government, 1945–51’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 16/3 (1988) 148–172CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hinds, A.E., ‘Sterling and Imperial Policy, 1945–1951’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15/2 (1987) 148–164CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, Official History of Colonial Development II, passim.

31 Buder, , Industrialisation, 256–269.Google Scholar

32 This confirms a line of argument in recen t discussions which emphasises the difficulties faced by business interests in securing their own interests in the prelude to decolonisation. See, for example, Tignor, Robert L., Capitalism and Nationalism at the End ofEmpire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton, New Jersey 1998)Google Scholar and Stockwell, Sarah, The Business of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (forthcoming, Oxford 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Stockwell for allowing me to consult her work before publication.

33 Fieldhouse, D.K., The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence and Development (Oxford 1999) 9–67.Google Scholar

34 Flint, J., ‘Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa’, African Affairs 82/328 (1983) 389–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the implications of this policy for the need to create new opportunities for ‘collaborating’ elites, see the same author's ‘“Managing Nationalism”: The Colonial Office and Nnamdi Azikiwe, 1932–43’ in: King, R.D. and Kilson, R. eds, The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of Wm. Roger Louis (London 1999) 143–158Google Scholar.