The Seed as Instrument: Agricultural Regulation, Knowledge, and the Colonial Subject in West Africa

This paper argues that colonial seed programmes in West Africa did more than introduce new crop varieties. They also transferred regulatory authority, reorganised agrarian knowledge, and helped produce colonial subjects. Building on Jane Guyer's account of shifting regulatory models in Britain and Nigeria, I argue that these models were not merely delayed or imperfectly copied in colonial settings. They were selectively reworked to serve imperial priorities, above all commodity extraction, administrative oversight, and the remaking of local agricultural practice. Drawing on Christophe Bonneuil's study of peanut breeding in Senegal, Susannah Chapman's analysis of rice innovation in The Gambia, and archival evidence from the potato scheme in Northern Nigeria, I show that the seed became a concentrated site where regulatory ambition, scientific expertise, and local knowledge met under unequal conditions. The result was not a coherent transfer of metropolitan governance but a form of colonial regulatory incoherence: a durable arrangement in which imported models were only partially implemented, redirected away from local welfare, and sustained through the suppression or appropriation of existing agrarian systems. The paper makes an important contribution to several different literatures, including the history of colonial agriculture, the history of agricultural biopolitics, technoscientific and regulatory interventions into living materials, and the history of plant breeding. Keywords: colonial agriculture; seed regulation; West Africa; agrarian knowledge; empire; varietal innovation