Agrarian doctrines of development: Part I

Doctrines of development are understood through a distinction between intentional development and the immanent process of capitalist development. Agrarian doctrine consists of proposals, usually associated with official policy, to undertake agrarian schemes of development based on small‐farm, household production. The intention is to compensate for mass unemployment, urban poverty and the threat of rural emigration. This article gives a historical account of two cases of agrarian doctrine. The first, that of nineteenth‐century Quebec following self‐government in 1848, illustrates the intention of land colonisation schemes to prevent emigration from French Canadian territory to the United States. In the second case, that of twentieth‐century Kenya, schemes of household production were developed in the face of the emergence of mass unemployment; their promotion, especially after political independence in 1963, accompanied the development of indigenous capitalism. The social trusteeship of development is the key to understanding agrarian doctrine. The article concludes by showing why agrarian doctrine underlies the ‘decentralised despotism ‘ at the heart of Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Citizen and Subject, and is an integral part of the historical roots of contemporary advocacy of decentralised rural development.     

Bankers,peasants, and land in British West Africa 1905–37

It has been consistently argued by development practitioners that the absence of rural credit from banks is one of the most debilitating aspects of African rural life. It has also been argued by historians that European bankers in Africa deliberately discriminated against rural African credit seekers. In this article we argue that, over a period of three decades, British bankers attempted to create lending facilities which were to be directly aimed at extending credit to West African smallholders. Bankers were prevented from doing so by the establishment in colonial law of ‘customary’ forms of land tenure overtly hostile to the recognition of African private property in land. The fear on the part of colonial officialdom was that bank credit, extended on the basis of a legal recognition of private property, would have a corrosive effect upon the African ‘community’. In the place of bank credit, officials promoted co‐operatives which were seen as more in keeping with African society. By failing to understand that it was officialdom, rather than bankers, that was responsible for the failure of the creation of rural bank credit, historians have been complicit in the maintainance of a ‘Fabian’ bias in much thinking about land and credit in Africa.