Colonial Economic Development Research Articles

From Colonial Order to Decolonial Future: Colonial Mimesis and Identity among the Papua Besena Movement

ABSTRACTDuring the 1970s and 1980s, a nationalist movement called Papua Besena emerged in Papua New Guinea. On the one hand, the group believed that the Papuan people were neglected by Australian colonisation and campaigned for Papuan sovereignty, either by creating an independent state or joining Australia as a state. On the other hand, as some scholars and politicians have pointed out, Papua Besena's rhetoric of colonial neglect failed to appreciate that Papuan people received more investment in colonial economic development, training, and infrastructure than most Papua New Guineans due to their proximity to the colonial centre. The Australian colonisation of the territories also changed due to pressure from the United Nations visiting mission. Yet despite the Papuan people's access to development, they still felt neglected and humiliated being so close to the colonial centre. To answer this paradox, the concept of mimesis, particularly the idea of colonial mimicry and mimesis as a source of identity, might shed new light on the political history and consciousness of Papuans. This paper suggests that Papuans' access to space, training, and positions was restricted in and around Port Moresby. Many Papuans took up the colonial moral order and mimicked the colonial perspective visible in the capital, projecting it into their decolonial future and their relationships with New Guineans and Australia. In other words, the Papuans' proximity to the colonial space and process contributed to their experiences of neglect and their identity simultaneously.

Market integration, empire and industry in the colonial economic development of the Buenos Aires meat industry (1770s–1800s)

ABSTRACT Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation.

Building a New Imperial State: The Strategic Foundations of Separation of Powers in America

Separation of powers existed in the British Empire of North America long before the U.S. Constitution of 1789, yet little is known about the strategic foundations of this institutional choice. In this article, I argue that separation of powers helps an imperial crown mitigate an agency problem with its colonial governor. Governors may extract more rents from colonial settlers than the imperial crown prefers. This lowers the Crown’s rents and inhibits economic development by settlers. Separation of powers within colonies allows settlers to restrain the governor’s rent extraction. If returns to settler investment are moderately high, this restraint is necessary for colonial economic development and ultimately benefits the Crown. Historical evidence from the American colonies and the first British Empire is consistent with the model. This article highlights the role of agency problems as a distinct factor in New World institutional development, and in a sovereign’s incentives to create liberal institutions.

Adebisi Sanusi Giwa (?- 1938): The life and career of an Ibadan entrepreneur and community leader

This article focuses on the development of indigenous entrepreneurship within the context of colonial economic development and Western-style commercial elitism. It explores the material development that accompanied the development of this class and its implications for social and economic change in Yorubaland of Western Nigeria. The socio-economic transformation that took place in Ibadan in the twentieth century resulted from the revolutionary zeal and potentials of a new generation of indigenous entrepreneurs, who ultimately affected the structure of their society in a very profound way. The essential contributions of Adebisi Giwa of Idikan in this regard remain central to the understanding of society, change and economic transformation in twentieth century Ibadan.

Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society (review)

Reviewed by: Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina1s Plantation Society Jennifer L. Goloboy Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina¹s Plantation Society. By Greene, Brana-Shute, and Sparks (eds.). Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Since its founding in 1994, the College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World has furthered the study of early South Carolina. Money, Trade, and Power, based on the Program’s 1995 conference, “New Directions in Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry Studies,” is the first book from their new publishing arm.1 The results will be particularly interesting for historians of colonial economic development, or of social interactions in a nascent plantation complex. Many of the essays cluster around two crisis points in South Carolina’s development. The first transition, from a “frontier” to a “plantation” economy, occurred in the years after the Yamassee War of 1715. (219) In this war, a group of several Native American tribes, led by the Yamassees, attacked the white settlers, but were defeated. After the war, trading relationships between the whites and the Native Americans were permanently poisoned. The supply of slaves from the Indians was shut off. (173) Meanwhile, the plantation system changed, as rice became the colony’s staple crop. Slaves no longer worked in “small, familial groups” alongside their masters, but in much larger “disciplined and rigorous” “labor camps,” where each slave was assigned a standardized task to complete. (219–220) Gary L. Hewitt shows that the colonial assembly worked to benefit the increasingly powerful planter class, rather than the colony’s merchants. A second transition occurred in the years after the slave rebellion at Stono in 1739. In combination with King George’s War of 1739–1748, Stono caused white South Carolinians to refine the plantation complex and try to strengthen their control over their slaves. The importation of African slaves was sharply reduced. As Matthew Mulcahy points out, many whites believed that slaves born in the colony were less prone to revolt. (289) Reacting to the high cost of wartime shipping, planters learned to value “self-sufficiency and diversification.” (226) They began to train more skilled slaves who could work on their plantations or return a steady income to their masters. Max Edelson adeptly analyzes how Henry Laurens’ skilled slaves accepted their isolation from other slaves in exchange for the rewards of “affiliating” with the master. (236–9) The essayists also demonstrate an interest in transatlantic connections. How did ideas travel through the Atlantic World? Jennifer Lyle Morgan shows that the concept that female slaves were valuable not only as laborers, but also because they could bear children, was transmitted from Barbados to South Carolina when slaveholders moved from the island to the mainland. Several essays reveal the Anglicization of South Carolina. Robert Olwell and Edward Pearson argue that eighteenth-century British concepts of power influenced the adaptation of law and gentility in a colonial context. Rather than analyzing all of the essays in this volume in detail, I’d like to mention two that I found particularly notable. Elizabeth Pruden’s “Investing Widows: Autonomy in a Nascent Capitalist Society” finds that South Carolinian widows were able to use the bond and mortgage markets to direct their financial futures. They were able to “sell plantations, move into Charleston, and lend capital at 8 to 10 percent.” (357) Hence, widows in South Carolina were more independent of their sons’ control than widows in other colonies. (346) Pruden’s essay continues a laudable new emphasis on credit and finance in early America. I would like to know whether South Carolina’s widows were able to retain their unusual independence in the face of the financial development of post-Revolutionary America. R.C. Nash’s “The Organization of Trade and Finance in the Atlantic Economy: Britain and South Carolina, 1670–1775,” another entry in his fine series of essays on colonial South Carolina’s overseas trade, is essential reading for anyone interested in colonial American commerce. Nash argues that in most British plantation colonies, major planters built unmediated relationships with British merchants. South Carolina, on the other hand, developed “a large...

The Economics of French Rule in Indochina: A Biography of Paul Bernard (1892–1960)

This article uses a biography of banker and economist Paul Bernard to describe the debates that influenced economic policy makers and business circles during the last quarter century of French rule in Indochina. Bernard, from the Great Depression through to his death in 1960, exercised considerable influence on the way French leaders thought about the economy of their Southeast Asian colony and of their overseas territories as a whole. As a financier, he also played a part in its shaping. This article outlines his business activities, especially as managing director of the French and Colonial Finance Company (SFFC), an important colonial finance house, and is to this extent a business history. Bernard, finally, participated in the state planning of the colonial economy during the heyday of French interventionism. From the point of view of his involvement, the article describes the role of the state in colonial economic development. His involvement was both constructive, in the drawing up of Indochina's industrialization plans, and critical, in repeated attacks on what he saw as misguided or irrelevant policy. He did not confine his comments to economic matters, and his criticism of the administration of Indochina may be taken as a running commentary of the final decades of France's colonial engagement in Southeast Asia.

Chartered Companies and the Development of the Tin Industry in Belgian Africa, 1900-1939

n 1891 a major step toward consolidating the tenuous control of Leopold II's Congo Free State over the wealth of Katanga was taken with the creation of a chartered company, the Compagnie du Katanga (CK). While the controversies generated by Leopold's predatory exploitation of rubber and ivory along the Congo river basin forced him to relinquish power to the Belgian Government in 1908, the concessions granted to the CK and similar companies remained intact. As a result, the shift away from forest products towards minerals as the economic backbone of the new Belgian Congo' did not change the position of chartered companies as the dominant economic and political force in the life of the colony. The power of the chartered companies based upon mineral exploitation meant that the Belgian Congo followed a distinctive pattern of colonial economic development which generated its own controversies. Excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, weakening of the autonomous power of the state, coercion of labor, and the draining of resources back to the metropolis, have all provided a basis for severe criticism of Belgian colonial rule.2 This paper will address some of these issues by examining the course of the development of a hitherto neglected mineral, tin. Unlike the deposits of all the other major minerals in the Congo, copper, gold, and diamonds, those containing tin-bearing cassiterite3 are found in geographically quite diverse regions throughout the whole of the eastern half of the colony. Not only were these in the domain of different chartered companies, but they included Ruanda, administered under a League of Nations mandate which precluded the granting of such concessions. The history of tin therefore provides an opportunity to undertake a comparative examination of the effect of development policies pursued under rather different regimes. Such comparisons will permit a reconsideration of the question of state-corporate relations, and the level of concentration of economic power. Although tin always remained behind the other major minerals in its contribution to the Congo economy, it came to occupy a much more important position in its international market. Quite insignificant prior to World War I, by World War II the Congo had become the largest producer in Africa.4 Furthermore, the Congo was the only new producer of any significance to emerge during the interwar period. Paradoxically, this did not occur when prices were rising rapidly during the 1920s, but during the depression of the 1930s (see Figure 1). For those trying to regulate the world tin industry, the timing could not have been worse. The Congo became significant just at the point at which the production restrictions imposed by the International Tin Committee (ITC) on the established producers had re-

Some Development Problems in Bali

In discussions on development in Indonesia the concept of centre-periphery has not been extensively used. It has been much commoner to utilize the dichotomy of inner and Indonesia. Inner Indonesia refers to Java, Madura, and Bali, the three islands characterized by extremely high population densities. Outer Indonesia comprises the remaining islands of the archipelago. During the colonial period the question of population numbers and density was significant. In Indonesia the lower population densities implied an availability of land for plantation and other similar forms of development, analogous to those being pursued in nearby Malaya. High population densities in inner Indonesia necessitated very particular forms of colonial economic development (for example, the sugar estates of east and central Java) in order to avoid insuperable problems of population displacement. Yet these same high densities enabled a greater degree of industrial development to take place, especially that designed to serve some of the basic needs of the Indonesian population. The inner-outer dichotomy conse quently came to reflect not just population density differences; it reflected also the difference between a relatively more industrialized and urbanized Java containing little large-scale commercial agriculture or mining, and a less urbanized outer region which, from certain specific areas, produced the greater part of the country's export income. The colonial economy was not an urban-based one. Exports consisted of crops produced by smallholders and plantations, or products from mining or forestry. A number of cities and towns existed in Indonesia during the colonial period, but they were not viewed by the government as primary development centres. There was an obvious need to build administrative centres, ports, transport nodes, and other central places which functioned within the structure of the colonial economy. Experience taught the colonial administration that the towns themselves were something of a problem. Politically they were fractious, pitting their Dutch inhabitants against a reluctant colonial government. Commer cially they were the main centres for the retailing and wholesaling by the Chinese, a group regarded with deep suspicion and generally prevented from conducting busi ness in the rural areas. For the poorer Indonesians towns were an unhealthy attrac tion, drawing migrants in considerable numbers to live in slum-like environments which were widely believed to constitute a hazard to their European neighbours. Post-colonial development, especially that of the last decade, has invested Indonesia's urban centres with a much expanded role. Although Indonesia remains 231

Colonial Economic Development with Unlimited Supply of Land: A Ricardian Case

The reader may notice the similarity between the title of this paper and that of Arthur Lewis's classic paper.l It is intentional. Like Lewis, I shall discuss development under conditions of perfectly elastic factor supply. But land has been substituted in the title for labor because ours is a land surplus rather than a labor surplus economy. However, a land surplus economy is only interesting if there are several qualities of land, and this takes us to Ricardo's theory of differential rent.2 Moreover, the scope of this paper is narrowed down to colonial economic development and that means agricultural development; under old-style imperialism, development in the colonies was concentrated to agriculture with infrastructure, trading facilities, and administrative institutions. I stop short of dealing fully with industrialization but do discuss its preconditions in our particular setting, and I shall briefly touch upon the possible application to a neocolonial setting with multinationals operating in independent less developed countries (LDCs) with surplus land. A Ricardian model with several qualities of land is, of course, more differentiated than standard models assuming homogeneous land (or simply including land in capital K). Our aim, however, is not just to set up a model with n qualities of land rather than one. In associating particular qualities of land with particular social classes, we shall go a step further in differentiation. Thus we shall take it that subsistence agriculture by illiterate and uneducated native farmers takes place exclusively

Probate Records as a Source for Early American History

HE varieties of human experience are not infinite, and the understanding of man proceeds through the study of the one, the few, and the many. Historians traditionally have concentrated on the first by focusing on the thoughts and actions of prominent individuals moving within a specific social and cultural milieu about which the researcher possesses a more or less clear picture. That picture, alas, is often the result of a series of camera's-eye views as perceived by the very actors themselves, and these views, superimposed one on the other, furnish the setting as well as the plot for the historian's narrative. No. wonder, then, that the earnest scholar searches for sources independent of his principals,, free of their influence yet pertinent to their fate. One such source exists in glorious profusion for students of early American history: the records of county probate courts. Many of these are available on microfilm, a few are published, and vast quantities rest in readily accessible archives.' The present writer's work in the records of Maryland and Massachusetts suggests that appropriate use of these materials can provide quantitative outlines of colonial economic development, furnish profiles of the evolving social structure, and sketch the contours of cultural change in the enclaves of European settlement in the New World.

Four African Development Plans: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania

Since 1950, the rise of African national movements and the attainment of independence has been paralleled by an equally rapid growth in the number and scope of national development plans. Such a plan is viewed by almost all African states as one of the standard attributes of sovereignty.1True, economic planning preceded independence. Indeed Ghana (then the Gold Coast) had its first, 10-year economic plan in 1919, and the British adoption of colonial economic development planning as a desired standard policy dates back to 1939–40. However, the rapid postwar surge of colonial public expenditure plans was closely related to attempts first to counter the popularity of the nationalist movements and later to strengthen the economic infrastructure during the terminal colonial phrase prior to independence.2