The Origin and Course of Fabian Colonialism in Africa

This article shows why and how the practices of Fabians in colonial Africa rested upon a socialist version of the doctrine of trusteeship. With its roots in nineteenth‐century Comtean positivism, Fabian colonialism originated in an attempt to transcend the limits of Chamberlainite development as part of the radical‐liberal reaction against the doctrine of development. The Labour Government's abortive colonial offensive of 1947 was unwittingly drawn out of Joseph Chamberlain's failed project to develop the ‘imperial estates’ of Africa through large‐scale capitalist enterprise to meet British industrial need. In 1906, the Liberal Party's electoral programme for free trade defeated Chamberlain's imperial and industrial project. The Liberal victory was followed by the success of radicals and liberals in making land nationalisation and peasant production the cornerstone of colonial policy for Africa. This policy confirmed a colonial formula of the early Fabians, such as Sydney Olivier, and marked out the contours for an imperial socialism that were later straightened out by, for instance, Leonard Woolf. As an African surplus population emerged most obviously in the 1930s, the key word of ‘development’ entered official language and did so in much the same way that it had earlier done in Britain at the turn of the century. Development came to mean state intervention for developing agriculture, and not industry, in an attempt to deal with the problem of urban unemployment and poverty. The agrarian bias of development, notwithstanding the failure of the large schemes of 1947 and the experience of white settlement in Kenya, marks the continuity of Fabian policy to the post‐colonial present.