ABSTRACT
’The role of agriculture in economic development’ has a strangely foreign ring in Africa. In a continent in which the urban employed population is tiny, in which only a small proportion of the population derive their living directly from non-agricultural sources, the development of agriculture is almost synonymous with economic development. As per capita income rises, import substitutive industries may provide a small industrial base, which may be further extended by agro-allied industries. But until intermediate demand has grown to a level sufficient to support a nascent capital goods industry, the bulk of the population must rely upon increasing agricultural output for an improvement in the standard of living. Even at quite high average per capita income figures, this may imply, for many individual farmers, a transition from subsistence to semi-commercial or full commercial production. In the period with which we shall be primarily concerned in this essay, namely 1880–1914, the connection between economic development and agriculture was inevitably so close as to be identical. Although cultural contact was very much older, the heyday of colonial rule was just beginning and with it, in European circles, dreams of agricultural wealth abounded. If the heroes of such dreams were sometimes planters and settlers, administrative policy soon recognized the practical and political problems that would attend large-scale alienation of land. Thus in West Africa almost exclusively, and in East Africa to a very considerable extent (except in the White Highlands of Kenya), agricultural development devolved upon the local population. But official interest in the development of African agriculture was motivated less by dreams of empire than by the mundane necessities, first, of creating a taxable income within the territory; second, of creating demand for expensive transport systems, the prime object of which was to serve administration; and third, of producing agricultural goods, and particularly, of course, cotton, for the industries of the metropolis.
