60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

58 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
nomic power. This is where Amery’s and ‘liberal imperialist’ ideas
converged. But the assumption that transitive development, to be successful,
had to cope with diff erent stages of civilisation in the Western
and non-Western world, also constituted the juncture at which ardent
critics of imperialism, such as J. A. Hobson, could nonetheless endorse
colonialism. Hobson’s views resembled those of J. S. Mill insofar
as both thought that British experts should govern ‘lower races’ for
the sake of global civilisation, and also ensure that British self-interest
and colonial welfare were not in contradiction (Hobson 1902: pt. II,
ch. IV, Sullivan 1983: 610-611). However, it is diffi cult to see how such
contradictions could be recognised, given that development was seen
as being induced from outside, in a process in which African social
relations played no part.
Insofar as they existed, all conceptions of colonial development in its
own right (liberal imperialist, Radical liberal, Conservative, or those
formulated by the French left after 1919), conceived of it as transitive
development from the centre. Moreover, they all tied colonial development
to an inclusive notion of national-imperial development. For
Amery, the settler state by its very existence enhanced African development.
For British liberals, colonial trusteeship, by the interwar
years, had come to imply a specifi c ideal of organising a distinct African
economic sector and the phasing of Africa’s integration into the
world economy. British offi cials, moreover, expected that taking into
account alleged hierarchies of civilisation between African societies
in the organisation of economies and the administration would minimise
tensions in colonial rule. Consequently, combating resistance
to colonialism tied a specifi c idea of ‘good government’ not only to
the notion of the ‘rule of law’ but also to a model of African development,
both in the intransitive and transitive sense of the word. Especially
since liberals accepted that colonial rule was inherently volatile,
not least in settler economies, self-contained African development
emerged as a synonym of stable government. The relevance of the
doctrine was enhanced by the fact that, as raw material prices dipped
in the depression, Britain’s stakes in many African colonies had become
limited, except with regard to a future world war. Both ‘constructive’
and liberal colonial doctrines of development thus contributed
in their assumptions and practices to the formation of concrete
social and economic boundaries, which could have a consequential
impact on forms of economic activity and welfare (Cowen/Shenton
1991). Whether or not related to social engineering, colonial agency
engaged structural realities in the wider world, potentially germinating
violence via dynamics of economic and social stratifi cation and
marginalisation.