Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire. By Aaron Windel

Abstract

In this impressive first monograph, Aaron Windel makes the case for seeing agricultural cooperatives as a political technology central to British colonial rule and its ends in Asia and Africa. He casts colonial cooperative societies as tools of political control and economic integration, but ones that were in many cases appropriated and subverted by the colonized. Writing with verve, clarity, and care, Windel makes this argument by drawing together diverse contexts from the British colonies, to Britain itself, and the Deep South of the USA. He demonstrates that the cooperative institutional form made possible not only the further encroachment of the global market forces on colonial agricultural economies, but also the rise of anti-colonial organizations such as the Kenya African National Union and the Uganda National Congress in the late colonial period. This engaging argument unfolds across five substantive chapters, which cover a timeframe that begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the 1960s. Chapter 1 details the emergence of colonial cooperativism as a much-hyped official project of Indian character reformation amid the crisis of colonial capitalism on the anti-colonial frontlines in Punjab. It also traces the transfer of cooperatives and their legislation to colonial Malaya, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Kenya, focusing on the role of cooperative evangelist-expert Claude Strickland. Chapter 2 is concerned with the contribution missionaries made to folding cooperatives into inter-war community development in the British Empire, as part of the ‘social gospel’ influenced by US rural sociology.