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| Title: | Industrialisation in Late Colonial Africa: A British Perspective |
| Author: | Butler, Larry J. |
| Year: | 1999 |
| Periodical: | Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History |
| Volume: | 23 |
| Issue: | 3-4 |
| Pages: | 123-135 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Africa Great Britain Subsaharan Africa |
| Subjects: | colonization industrial development colonialism History and Exploration Development and Technology Economics and Trade |
| Abstract: | One of the criticisms of European colonial rule in Africa is that the colonial State failed to create a climate in which industrialization might have been possible. This paper does not dispute the fact that in most of late colonial Africa industrialization was negligible, but drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly West Africa, and focusing on colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it suggests that the British colonial State did attempt to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development. While the Depression of the 1930s forced colonial policymakers to consider means of freeing the colonies of their dependence on narrow export bases, it was the impact of the Second World War which convinced the policymakers that colonial self-sufficiency must involve scope for industrialization. However, British colonial officials' deliberations on industrialization were marked by the fractured interests of the imperial State in the colonial sphere, as both the representative of metropolitan interests in the colonies, and the defender of colonial interests in Britain. Moreover, as Colonial Office aims became more interventionist, its relations with individual colonial governments were liable to become strained. The issue of industrialization also confirms the danger of assuming that the late colonial State customarily served the interests of British expatriate capital. The prescience of policymakers is often striking: their economic and social objectives were linked to long-term political development. Notes, ref. |
