Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain's Late Empire

By Aaron Windel

While many have interpreted the cooperative movement as propagating a radical alternative to capitalism, Cooperative Rule shows that in the late British Empire, cooperation became an important part of the armory of colonialism. The system was rooted in British rule in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Officials and experts saw cooperation as a unique solution to the problems of late colonialism, one able to both improve economic conditions and defuse anticolonial politics by allowing community uplift among the empire’s primarily rural inhabitants. A truly transcolonial history, this ambitious book examines the career of cooperation from South Asia to Eastern and Central Africa and finally to Britain. In tracing this history, Aaron Windel opens the door for a reconsideration of how the colonial uses of cooperation and community development influenced the reimagination of community in Europe and America from the 1960s onward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520381896

Aaron Windel

Aaron Windel is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University.  

Book preview

Cooperative Rule

BERKELEY SERIES IN BRITISH STUDIES

Edited by James Vernon

1. The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon

2. Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945–1975, by Ian Hall

3. The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795, by Kate Fullagar

4. The Afterlife of Empire, by Jordanna Bailkin

5. Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East, by Michelle Tusan

6. Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture, by Corinna Wagner

7. A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973, by Karl Ittmann

8. Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, by Andrew Sartori

9. Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon

10. Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, by Daniel I. O’Neill

11. Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910, by Tom Crook

12. Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1976–1903, by Aidan Forth

13. Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain, by Charlotte Greenhalgh

14. Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985, by Rob Waters

15. Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain, by Kieran Connell

16. Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, by Kevin Grant

17. Serving a Wired World: London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, by Katie Hindmarch-Watson

18. Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire, by Caroline Ritter

19. Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire, by Emily Baughan

20. Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire, by Aaron Windel

Cooperative Rule

Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire

Aaron Windel

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Aaron Windel

Some of the material in chapters 1 and 2 appeared in different form as part of the following chapters in edited collections: Mass Education, Cooperation, and the ‘African Mind,’ in Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, ed. Peter Bloom, Stephan Miescher, and Takyiwaa Manuh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Cooperatives and the Technocrats; or, ‘the Fabian Agony Revisited,’ in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation Building between the Wars, ed. Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (London: The Institute of Historical Research/University of London Press, 2012); and The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Political Economy of Community Development, in Empire and Film, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011). The author thanks the editors and publishers of those collections.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Windel, Aaron, 1976– author.

Title: Cooperative rule : community development in Britain’s late empire / Aaron Windel.

Other titles: Berkeley series in British studies ; 20.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Series: Berkeley Series in British Studies ; 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021908 (print) | LCCN 2021021909 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520381872 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520381889 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520381896 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Community development—Great Britain—20th century. | Cooperation—Great Britain—20th century. | Great Britain—Colonies—Administration.

Classification: LCC HN400.C6 W55 2022 (print) | LCC HN400.C6 (ebook) | DDC 307.1/40941—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021908

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021909

Manufactured in the United States of America

30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For my parents, Rebecca and William

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Cooperative Rule

2. Pedagogies of Community Development

3. Anti-empire, Development, and Emergency Rule

4. Uganda’s Anti-colonial Cooperative Movement

5. Cooperatives and Decolonization in Postwar Britain

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Batu Seblas Co-operative Rice Mill Society, Ltd., Kelantan, Malaya, 1950

2. Electrified cotton ginnery near Kampala, Uganda

3. A farmer has his cotton weighed at a ginnery in Uganda, 1955

4. A Colour Bar at a Co-op?, Daily Mirror cartoon, July 1960

5. Anti-Apartheid Movement leaflet for the month of boycott, March 1960

6. United Kingdom Information Office window display, Dar es Salaam, 1960

Acknowledgments

I would never have been able to write this book without the support I have received from my teachers and mentors at the University of Minnesota. Anna Clark, my PhD adviser, shaped me as a scholar and was the one who first suggested that of the several threads I had uncovered in my dissertation research on community development in the British empire, I should write a book about the cooperative movement. I have benefited so much from Anna’s friendship and willingness to offer sage advise and critique as the project evolved since then. Allen Isaacman introduced me to the social history of Africa and profoundly influenced my thinking on development and colonialism. I was lucky to have been in seminars led by Patricia Lorcin and Thomas Wolfe and to have had conversations with both that have made an imprint on this book.

Over the years I have been incredibly fortunate to have friends to talk with about this book and themes related at conferences, in living rooms, and via phone calls and emails, or who checked in and cheered me on to finish it. Thanks to Timothy Alborn, Laura Beers, Ellen Boucher, Corrie Decker, Mehmet Dosemeci, George Gathigi, Robb Haberman, Caley Horan, David Madden, Marc Matera, Julia Musha, Radhika Natarajan, Susan Pedersen, Eric Richtmyer, Nathan Sain, Jeff Schauer, Jennifer Thomson, Amy Tyson, Andy Urban, Janet S. K. Watson, and Elizabeth Williams.

I am grateful to colleagues who took time to share ideas and ask good questions, gave encouragement, offered feedback on chapter drafts and conference papers, or otherwise sent me in good directions: Jordanna Bailkin, Jeffrey Byrne, Aaron Jakes, Nahum Karlinsky, Susan Kent, Prakash Kumar, Derryl MacLean, Stephan Miescher, David Morton, Nicole Sackley, Priya Satia, Andrew Sartori, Simon Stevens, and Thomas Spear. Thanks especially to Laura Beers, Peter Bloom, and Lee Grieveson, who edited articles of mine near the beginning of the project before I really knew where it was going. Holly Hanson read big chunks of the book and shared resources and immensely valuable insights on late-colonial politics in Buganda. I am grateful to her.

I am grateful to the archivists at all the archives in which I have worked during the course of this project, with special thanks to the archivists at Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections in London and the Zanzibar National Archives, who went above and beyond in helping me locate material.

University of California Press and the Berkeley Series in British Studies have been a pleasure to work with. James Vernon was an amazing series editor. He read drafts of chapters as I completed them, gave fantastic feedback, and set up great challenges for me. Thanks to Niels Hooper for guiding the manuscript through review and for guiding me through the final revisions, and thanks to Enrique Ochoa-Kaup and Robin Manley for their assistance preparing the manuscript. Thanks as well to Jon Dertien and Sharon Langworthy for help in editing and finalizing the manuscript for publication.

My deepest thanks to Susan Pennybacker and the other anonymous reader for UCP. Both offered much-appreciated interventions and detailed maps for revision.

I wrote a lot of this book at home in Vancouver and was privileged to be able to draw on the support of a wonderful group of colleagues and friends. In the History Department at Simon Fraser University I am especially grateful to my writing group colleagues Roxanne Panchasi, Nicolas Kenny, and Evdoxios Doxiadis, who read a lot of the manuscript in its roughest stages and helped me think through how to put it all together. I also wish to thank Tina Adcock, El Chenier, Willeen Keough, Thomas Kuehn, Mark Leier, Emily O’Brien, Bidisha Ray, Jennifer Spear, Ilya Vinkovetsky, and Sarah Walshaw. My warm thanks as well to Vancouver friends Laura Ishiguro, Dimitris Krallis, Jack Little, Eryk Martin, the late Robert McDonald, Lara Campbell, and Nicole Vittoz.

I have the best sisters and brothers. Keenan, Megan, Nathan, Lauren—thank you all. My loving parents, William and Rebecca, have cheered me on and supported me always. Finally, Chantal Norrgard has been there for me throughout the writing of this book with love and support and has helped me in immeasurable ways.

Introduction

This book is about how the cooperative movement came to occupy the center of colonial development and its spectacle of community-driven rural modernization in the late British empire.¹ It traces the long colonial career of an idea to use cooperatives—that is, formally organized groups that join together for a common purpose, pool their resources and share risk, and redistribute gains to members—as part of a strategy of imperial rescue and colonial rule. The book tracks how that strategy evolved and moved as a technopolitics from its roots in late nineteenth-century British India to eventually triumph as empire-wide development policy in the postwar Labour government, coinciding with the rise of community development. Community development rose to prominence in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a cluster of theories and practices of development that addressed a decolonizing Global South. Its meanings, practices, and aims were diverse. It was not solely a feature of British colonialism. It was deployed by imperial states and Cold War superpowers as well as by emergent postcolonial states, though to very different ends. For colonial powers, community development fit in their repertoire of development techniques designed to stabilize colonial rule. Against that usage, African and Asian postcolonial states used community development strategies to break free from European domination, and community development was a common thread linking efforts at national economic development as part of the international Third World Non-Aligned Movement, which arose after the Bandung Conference of 1955.² Community development’s defining claim was that it was supposed to help the predominantly rural communities of the late colonial and postcolonial world unlock their own latent capacities for improvement and modernization. Cooperatives were often part of community development, and they were especially important in its late imperial British conception and practice.

Cooperative rule grasps the entanglement of the cooperative movement with colonial systems. I take it from a comment made by Lord Frederick Lugard, former colonial governor of Nigeria and refiner of the theory and practice of British indirect rule in Africa, in a preface he wrote for Claude Strickland’s Co-operation for Africa (1933). In that book Strickland, formerly in charge of the influential Cooperative Department in Punjab in India and later apostle for colonial cooperatives for the wider British empire, made the case that colonial governments should reconstruct African society using cooperatives. While praising Strickland’s ideas, Lugard wrote that he wished he could rebrand indirect rule as Cooperative Rule. What he meant was that cooperatives were a modern economic and social formation that leveraged already existing community ties and could be easily grafted onto what he understood to be traditional African society; that kind of grafting work to stabilize the old society so as to gradually transform it was, for Lugard, the very essence of indirect rule.³ He was echoing earlier claims, going back several decades, from practitioners of indirect rule in India who thought there was a natural affinity between cooperative organization and village communities there.⁴ I use Lugard’s phrase cooperative rule both to underscore the connection between colonial cooperatives and techniques of indirect rule and to evoke something beyond Lugard’s intended meaning, since for him indirect rule was synonymous with benevolent British trusteeship. I want to emphasize instead how in labeling it that way—cooperative rule—Lugard had inadvertently suggested the key truth about cooperatives in British colonial development: they were designed to rule—that is, to dominate, to govern from a hierarchical position above. This was political technology (a technopolitics) wielded by colonial power and used to support empire.

In this book, then, I use the phrases cooperative rule and cooperative development interchangeably as shorthand for the British effort to promote and control (through law and administrative systems) cooperatives of various kinds in colonial territories.⁵ Strickland was the major theorist involved in elaborating the strategy, and Lugard was one of the many British officials and experts on colonial government won over by it. In tracking cooperative rule as it was transferred from British administrations and early community developers in India to new places in Africa and Asia, I take stock of the colonial situations in which cooperatives were called upon to solve crises that authorities saw as threatening the colonial order. In doing so I survey the dynamic fields of politics that cooperative development entered during late colonialism and decolonization, and I think about how colonial ideology was embedded within this new domain of development knowledge and planning. Although I survey the workings of cooperative development in India, Malaya, and the British-ruled League of Nations mandate of Palestine, I focus especially on cooperative rule in East Africa, where the British had extended the reach of their empire by the turn of the twentieth century to Zanzibar, Kenya, and Uganda and, after World War I, to the former German-colonized Tanganyika territory as a League of Nations mandate. In the region, as elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the British saw the future of colonial development in terms of extracting agricultural commodities. Cooperative development was applied to work with that overarching strategy, but the British also conceived of cooperatives as a means of shoring up British systems of rule against political challenges. From the 1920s through the 1960s officials in the colonial territories themselves and in London looked on worriedly at growing political formations and movements that took aim at British colonial rule, including Garveyism, varieties of African nationalism and internationalism, and communism. There were moments of panic in British officialdom about challenges to indirect rule growing among the Chagga in the Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanganyika in the 1920s, a rising anti-colonial movement among the Kikuyu around the main zone of European settler-colonial power in Kenya, and an independence movement in Uganda that was growing especially strong among the Ganda in the 1940s. The British feared that these and other African political movements would one day coalesce into a massive front against British imperial rule.

Development thus presented one part of a strategy to combat those political challenges, so the whole story of the official efforts to spread the cooperative movement needs to be viewed as part of a strategy of imperial rescue. In tracing the story of cooperative rule, I call attention to how the colonial ideology embedded in it could be contested and subverted by anti-colonial movement builders who envisioned cooperatives differently, both tactically and as part of their postcolonial development imaginaries.⁶ I explore that subversion of cooperative rule in detail in the middle chapters of the book in the story of Uganda’s anti-colonial cooperative movement. In Uganda in the late 1940s and early 1950s a movement of cotton and coffee farmers used cooperatives to pose a powerful challenge to colonial authority and to the British-structured colonial economy, which the farmers’ movement decried as racist, and to imagine an alternative pathway for cooperative development. To defend their position, the British imposed emergency powers in ways that brought cooperative rule fully into the repressive toolkit of Britain’s end-of-empire authoritarianism. My purpose, then, is to trace the evolution of cooperative development as rule to explain why it was that anti-colonial movements could easily recognize it as such and combat it accordingly, while late imperial Britons, captivated by the spectacle of British community development, were usually only capable of seeing cooperatives in the colonies as authentically democratic. In the final chapter I show how cooperatives came to symbolize British colonial development in the postwar moment in Britain and how Britons refracted their view of empire through a broadly shared enthusiasm for the cooperative movement, making postwar Britons only more inclined to see colonial rule as an agent of democratic change even as cooperative development merged, in Africa and elsewhere, with emergency rule.⁷

A key factor that helped to move colonial development plans for cooperatives from their evolution as a colonial technopolitics to their position in the foreground of Britons’ postwar colonial development imaginary was the cooperative movement’s position as a pillar of culture in modern Britain. The cooperative movement in Britain had grown in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism, connected to working-class self-help strategies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike most of the cooperatives advanced later by colonial community developers, which tended to be agricultural producer cooperatives, in Britain the movement had always centered on consumer cooperation. Some of the first cooperatives were cooperative flour mills and retail clubs, established by the urban poor in Britain in an effort to get a cheaper price for bread and to fight back against profit-seeking millers and shopkeepers. Starting in the 1820s, similar working-class projects were infused with the utopian socialism of the wealthy industrialist turned humanitarian Robert Owen, whose legacy would remain strong in the British cooperative movement throughout its subsequent history.⁸ Owen believed that social transformation toward a more equitable society would come about not through a revolution that toppled the capitalist ruling class but through a gradual training of the character of individuals—and eventually society at large—in principles of cooperation. He thought these should be taught and practiced in Villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation (such as the short-lived one he founded in New Harmony, Indiana).⁹ While Owenite intentional communities did not last, there was staying power in Owen’s conceptual framework of proliferating spaces of cooperative practice to gradually transform society away from self-interest and profit and into socialism. His followers founded shops in Britain that tried to put his ideas into action, and Owenite shops and similar cooperative stores were one part of the repertoire of working-class movement building popular before and during the Chartist movement of the 1830s–1840s.¹⁰ The decline of Chartism led some to search for gradual solutions to grow socialism and empower the working class, and it was in that political dynamic that the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society in England’s industrial north was formed by a group of men that included flannel weavers, Chartists, and Owenites.¹¹

Because the Rochdale Pioneers laid out a set of principles that were taken up by others, as the cooperative movement grew into a national consumer movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the Rochdale shop that got worked into the movement’s lore as the true original co-op. In turn, fidelity to the Rochdale Principles became the test of whether a cooperative was authentic or not. There were eight principles: democratic control (each co-op member had one vote regardless of share size); membership open to all; fixed and limited interest on capital; distribution of the cooperative’s surplus as a dividend in proportion to a member’s purchases; cash trading; pure and unadulterated goods; commitment to education; and political and religious neutrality.¹² As the cooperative movement grew internationally—with societies of various types around the world linked up through the International Cooperative Alliance, founded in London in 1895—the spirit of the Rochdale Principles was revered even if some of the code’s provisions applied only to consumer societies. The Rochdale Pioneers were turned into founding fathers of the international movement. Even where the specific forms of cooperation had very distinct local origins completely disconnected from what was happening in Britain in the 1840s—as in Europe, where the cooperative movement centered more on urban and rural modes of producer rather than consumer cooperation, whether in agricultural credit, marketing, or other forms—their cooperators never tired of singing the praises of the British movement and its founders.¹³

Though the consumer shop was its center, the British cooperative movement became much more than a network of shops. In the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries the co-op held a prominent place in the social and cultural life of nearly every city and town in Britain and was a central part of the labor movement.¹⁴ The consumer movement formed its own institutions to connect its multitude of shops. The Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) and its Scottish equivalent linked most shops in Britain to a central provider of grocery goods and other merchandise, extending its supply chains into the British empire and beyond. The Cooperative Union became the major cultural and educational entity of the movement, printing propaganda to spread the movement and convening a national congress of cooperators each year starting in 1869. While societies were supposed to remain politically neutral according to the code of Rochdale, the movement as a whole entered party politics decisively in 1917 with the formation of the Cooperative Party.¹⁵ Annual Cooperative Party conferences brought together delegates from political committees of the individual societies. A close alignment grew between the cooperative movement and the trade union movement, strengthened by agreements after World War I that made the Labour Party and the Cooperative Party (also referred to as the Co-op Party) a united force in elections and a joint presence in Parliament. Even Fabian socialists, enthralled by technocratic modernization and convinced that the state needed to be the main agent of change, saw cooperatives as integral to the future worker and consumer democracy that they envisioned.¹⁶ It was also the Fabians who made sure cooperatives were part of the labor movement’s paternalistic approach to the empire.¹⁷ Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, secretary of state for the colonies under Labour’s second brief government (1929–1931), was instrumental in setting up the first attempts by the Colonial Office to spread and control a cooperative movement in Africa. Britain’s postwar Labour government solidified the place of cooperatives at the center of British long-term plans for colonial development. Fabians were again influential at the Colonial Office and in Parliament (through their Fabian Colonial Bureau) and pushed to create or expand rural bureaucracies of cooperative publicity, registration, and supervision throughout the empire. Under Labour’s 1945 government the Advisory Committee on Cooperation in the Colonies was set up to monitor and advise from London and to serve as a central hub of information about the progress of the movement.

At this point it would be very easy to misconstrue (as many late imperial Britons did) what was happening with cooperative development in the British empire in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Seeing the anchoring of the cooperative movement in working-class struggles in Britain and socialist Labour secretaries of state for the colonies invested in that history taking action to spread the cooperative movement to Africa and Asia and other parts of the empire, we might conclude that during the postwar moment, when the Labour Party reached the height of its political power, it got to work trying to undo the negative forms of colonial power (including colonial capitalism) that had been spread by the British empire to new places in the modern era, trying to build democratic socialism in their place. The idea that cooperatives could work with British systems of colonial power is awkward given the popular meanings about democracy that are usually attached to the movement, but it should really not be surprising given the British cooperative movement’s long history, in which it was largely at peace within capitalism. To be sure, there was always a utopianism attached to the movement, and in the writings and speeches of many of its leaders an avowed anti-capitalism (this was true even through the postwar era covered in this book). Cooperators dreamed that they would create a democratic society, built on socialist principles, that moved out and up from many local neighborhood democracies of the co-op to wider national and international horizons. After the 1890s their utopian dream increasingly went under the banner of The Cooperative Commonwealth, which meant socialism.¹⁸ And yet the movement was always ameliorative and reformist in its approach to how to change society, aiming to adjust communities to industrial society and striving to gradually improve material conditions. Most cooperators and cooperative movement leaders had no desire to challenge capitalism by democratizing the work process, especially not in British cooperative movement’s factories and plantations in the empire, where surpluses were won and competitive advantage gained by exploiting workers terribly and where the co-op participated alongside capitalist firms and colonial states in transforming ecosystems of colonial territories to make them work with the logics of the imperial economy.¹⁹ And what about the various forms of cooperatives started up by European settlers in colonial territories? There was nothing anti-capitalist in a settler farmers’ cooperative organizing, cartel-like, to pay workers in area as little as they possibly could on their farms (on occupied land, procured for them by the law and order of a colonial state, backed by the powerful British military). Yet that was a very common way in which settler colonialism spread the cooperative light in Africa, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Given its long history of working within capitalism—and indeed colonial/imperial capitalism—without challenging its base of accumulation, it is not surprising that in the British empire cooperatives could work with colonial rule.

To understand what made the cooperative movement so appealing to British community developers concerned with colonial rule, however, we have to appreciate the connection that colonial officials, missionaries, and others in the development knowledge complex of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries made between the problem of social change and the problem of colonial order. In India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, to rule was to preserve order, which meant managing social change. As Karuna Mantena argues, that impulse started in India in the second half of the nineteenth century, when techniques and governing doctrines of imperial rule broke with earlier nineteenth-century liberal and moral discourses about empire’s purpose. Where empire’s earlier imperative had been to catalyze change in Indigenous society, and domination was justified as essential for moral and material progress, in the later nineteenth century British officials and the experts whose works they read started to see social change, or more precisely the pace of it, as a fundamental problem. Violent resistance to the British empire, such as that in the 1857 Rebellion, was determined to be the result of rapid change and the tearing of social fabric in what was, in anthropological analyses of the day, termed traditional society, theorized as a cohesive, cultural whole that likewise was seen to resist the logic of modern society.²⁰ The important theorist here was Sir Henry Maine, whose writings became influential in recasting the underpinning rationalities of British rule. Maine argued that native society and its communal and customary basis of organization were in dissolution, and the village community needed to be protected from the encroaching new forces of social change. British rule was partly to blame. Its new regimes of private property and tax and encroachments of commerce and a market society, Maine thought, had accelerated a pattern of social change that in other places (such as Europe) had been slow and gradual.²¹ The pattern of social change was inevitable, but if British rulers wanted to avoid the unknown catastrophes of too-rapid social change, they needed to find ways of slowing the pace of change to village communities. As Mantena writes of the influence of Maine in formulating indirect rule as it would be applied in India and later in Africa, Indirect rule involved a new ‘alibi for permanent protective rule’ premised on the British empire as simultaneously cause and cure for the crisis of native society.²² The exact sources and nature of that crisis would continually shift, but the primary task of empire now became the search for solutions to halt the collapse of native societies and contain the crisis, which presented a wholly new rationale for empire, and implied a new framework for the structure of imperial rule."

It was in this new structure of rule that colonial administrators sought cooperative solutions, starting at the end of the nineteenth century in India and continuing through their ascent to empire-wide policy by World War II. Where we find community developers and cooperative boosters among government experts and others worried about rapidly changing native society, we need to see that thought pattern as flowing from colonialism’s dominant ideology and that rationality—or alibi as Mantena puts it—of rule. It is easy to find echoes of Maine’s reasoning about native society in crisis in the pages of Cooperative Department reports from India and from their counterparts in Africa, in exchanges between Colonial Office experts and rural developers, and in records chronicling the missionary-government collaborative efforts at systems building in the field of education in Africa, where cooperatives were worked into pedagogy. It is at the heart of Lugard’s formulation of cooperative rule. Other elements flowed into that grand project of rule. Ideas to develop and reconstruct society using cooperatives ended up entwining three strands of thought on how and in what specific directions to guide social transformation in Africa and Asia via community development. First was the aforementioned overarching logic of indirect rule as a practice of slowing the pace of change and finding mechanisms to direct it in order to stabilize the colonial order. Second was a new twentieth-century colonial-modernist approach to using systems, science (experts), and rural bureaucracy to execute that project of rule.²³ Third was an older tradition present in the cooperative movement from the beginning in its Owenite roots—namely, the project of creating and proliferating self-help spaces for the training of individual character as a generator of gradual, nonrevolutionary social reconstruction.²⁴

The first attempts to work with cooperatives as part of indirect rule came out of the early twentieth-century technoscience of development deployed by the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and its rural administrative machinery, and especially that perfected in Punjab Province during the first quarter of the twentieth century. There ICS officials tried to use cooperatives to reconstruct society in order to gradually train an idealized peasantry drawn from a population of mostly Muslim cultivators, whom the colonial state determined were plagued by not only hopeless levels of debt to Hindu moneylenders but also an instability of character and lack of economic fluency that only the cooperative movement could cure. In the specific context of Punjab and in other parts of India, officials looked to adapt the rural credit societies that had been started in Germany starting in the 1860s by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen. The Raiffeisen societies targeted indebted small farmers, and besides being a means of producer rather than consumer self-help, they modified the Rochdale script in two key ways: rather than pledging share capital to become members, members of these rural co-ops went in with unlimited liability, pledging their farms, their stock, or their farming tools; in addition, rather than paying a dividend, the co-op’s capital on savings deposits and loan repayment was put back into a reserve fund to enable the society to continue lending.²⁵ Taking the Raiffeisen prototype and believing that rural cultivators in India were too simple to follow it without close oversight and control, the ICS then crafted a rural bureaucracy of cooperative publicity, registration, and supervision that officials believed would be a panacea to rescue peasants from debt, shape peasant character, and reconstruct rural society in ways that supported colonial rule and aligned with British ideals of colonial modernity. This was the Owenite concept of character formation through the inculcation of cooperative practice, but what the ICS was trying to produce were loyal subjects of the empire, and it was trying to cure a social instability through rural reconstruction that the ICS worried, if left uncured, would produce dangerous threats to colonial order.

The work of the ICS made colonial cooperation one of the big community development ideas of interwar imperial Britain. As it was copied by other colonial governments, it straddled several colonial fields of administration and development knowledge: native education, agricultural management, and marketing law. The British system, which was meant to promote and supervise all types of cooperatives even if its early efforts focused on rural credit, was often discussed in international development circles and at the League of Nations, sometimes alongside other efforts at similar concepts of cooperative organization like the sociétés de prévoyance promoted by French governments in Africa.²⁶ Strickland was the important figure in moving the ICS’s cooperative system into international development discourse and into usage by the Colonial Office and colonial governments in Africa and Asia. He spent most of his career in Punjab Province’s Cooperative Department, helping to oversee its growth at the start of the twentieth century from a new administrative unit into one of the main development agencies in the province. When he retired from the top position of Cooperative Registrar at the end of the 1920s, he embarked on a second career as a traveling expert and apostle for colonial cooperative development, arguing for how the ICS’s model of cooperation, perfected in Punjab, could be adapted for agriculturists everywhere in the British empire. His study and advisory tours covered a wide swath of the empire that included visits to Malaya in the eastern Indian Ocean, Palestine, Zanzibar off the coast of eastern Africa, Tanganyika Territory in East Africa, and Nigeria and British Cameroon in West Africa. As a result of his tours and his writings and lectures, Strickland played a key role in establishing how cooperative development was talked about in journals and in venues in London where imperial administrators, academics, missionaries, and philanthropists mingled and planned how they would together develop Africa and Asia. He is an early example of the kind of circulating expert who would become the staple personnel of the international development framework during the Cold War.²⁷

Strickland’s first stop was Malaya, a place that, like the rest of the Indian Ocean world linking South Asia with Southeast Asia and eastern Africa, had been dramatically transformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by European imperialism and colonial capitalism. The Indian Ocean’s interconnected regions had been linked by empire in new ways through flows of capital and industrial resources and commodities, the mass migration of labor (in various forms of bondage or indenture), as well as by the circulation of anti-colonial politics (emanating especially from India and the rising nationalist movements there starting in the 1920s).²⁸ Malaya had been turned into a plantation colony under British rule. Many thousands of Tamil migrant workers arrived each year to work on the large European-owned rubber plantations, while much of the land held by Malay and Chinese smallholders was also dedicated to rubber trees. British colonial officials oversaw a system that made Malaya an immensely profitable colony but produced tremendous inequality and left most people without rights. Looking on anxiously at the rise of nationalism in China and India and the growing popularity of anti-colonial politics of various forms, officials turned their attention to development and welfare in hopes of staving off revolution, and Strickland was brought in to advise on how to grow a cooperative movement. The common thread running through all of Strickland’s missions and in the social analysis he produced was that political crises—whether looming in the future or exploding in the moment—stemmed from problems with rural societies that were suddenly faced with modern conditions. This conviction was shared by many British colonial officials of his day. To escape such crises, Strickland argued, colonial states needed to develop cooperative movements to reconstruct individuals (because character problems, namely the lack of thrift, were always at the root), groups, and society at large. His ideas were influential in the Colonial Office and with high-level officials in colonies and territories ruled by Britain. In 1930 Strickland was recruited to go to Palestine to advise on how to apply cooperatives to fix an Arab rural debt crisis that officials believed had been the primary structural cause behind a weeklong Arab uprising the year before that involved attacks on Jewish settlements. Strickland confirmed what other officials in Mandatory Palestine already believed: that the problem of Arab debt that led to loss of land and then to violence stemmed ultimately from flaws in Arab character; these could only be fixed with cooperative tutelage working a gradual transformation of individuals and groups.

Cooperatives, placed under close control of the colonial state, had to uphold colonial order. An ironclad rule for Strickland and for officials who adopted his ideas was that however the cooperative movement was allowed to take form in a British territory, it needed to support the already existing frameworks of colonial rule. These varied from place to place and often hinged on promoting the power of certain groups over others, all to keep the steady stream of agricultural commodities flowing. In Zanzibar, a plantation colony almost entirely dedicated to clove growing, the British were determined to uphold the power of Omani Arabs as a landholding caste and as employers of African plantation workers (many of whom were descendants of slaves who had been brought to the island from mainland East Africa before slavery was formally abolished in 1897). Interwar officials in Zanzibar worried that increasing levels of Arab