After Developmentalism and Globalization, What?

Abstract

In 1900, in preparation for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the French Ministry of Colonies asked Camille Guy, the head of its geographical service, to produce a book entitled Les colonies francaises: la mise en valeur de notre domaine coloniale. A literal translation of mise en valeur is “making into value.” The dictionary, however, translates “mise en valeur” as “development.” At the time, this expression was preferred, when talking about economic phenomena in the colonies, to the perfectly acceptable French word, “developpement.” If one then goes to Les Usuels de Robert: Dictionnaire des Expressions et Locutions fi gurees (1979) to learn more about the meaning of the expression “mettre en valeur,” one fi nds the explanation that it is used as a metaphor meaning “to exploit, draw profi t from.” Basically, this was the view of the pan-European world during the colonial era concerning economic development in the rest of the world. Development was a set of concrete actions effectuated by Europeans to exploit and draw profi t from the resources of the non-European world. There were a number of assumptions in this view: Non-Europeans would not be able or perhaps even willing to “develop” their resources without the active intrusion of the pan-European world. But such development represented a material and moral good for the world. It was therefore the moral and political duty of the pan-Europeans to exploit the resources of these countries. There was consequently nothing wrong with the fact that, as a reward, the pan-Europeans who exploited the resources drew profi t from them, since a secondary advantage would go to the persons whose resources were being exploited in this way. This rationale of course completely omitted discussion of the cost in life and limb to the local people of such exploitation. The conventional calculus was that these costs were, as we would say in today’s euphemisms, the necessary and inevitable “collateral damage” of Europe’s “civilizing mission.” The tone of the discussion began to change after 1945, primarily as a result of the strength of anticolonial sentiments and movements in Asia and Africa,