New Zealand and the Colombo Plan in the long 1950s

Abstract

This article suggests that the Colombo Plan provided significant ways for New Zealand governments to engage cautiously with the process of decolonisation in Asia and to perform New Zealand to the world. The Colombo Plan facilitated New Zealand’s experience of post-war conference diplomacy when Wellington hosted the annual meeting of the Colombo Plan’s Consultative Committee in 1956, New Zealand’s first such international diplomatic meeting of this kind. One well-promoted aspect of New Zealand’s involvement in the Colombo Plan was its sponsorship of Asian students. In addition, having promoted themselves as ‘the empire’s dairy farm’ in the interwar years, New Zealand governments offered milk as development assistance and as a means of connecting Asia’s needs with their own national story. Through the long 1950s the Colombo Plan was helpfully suggestive to New Zealand politicians and civil servants interested in what the changing international landscape meant for their role in a decolonising world; and as a case study, it is also suggestive for what it offers to historians of development more generally.