ABSTRACT
Colonial governments in the 1940s thought of development as an idea which would reinvigorate colonialism, but it turned out to be central to the process by which colonial elites convinced themselves that they could give up colonies. French and British officials believed that their development initiatives would make colonies simultaneously more productive and more ideologically stable in the tumult of the postwar years; they sent waves of experts to Africa to refashion the way farmers farmed and workers worked, to restructure health and education. Postwar imperialism was the imperialism of knowledge. But within a scant ten years, the developmental initiative had lost its reformist zeal, and instead of development being a colonial initiative—requiring authority as well as expertise—it was being discussed as a natural unfolding of a universal social process, which human agents could facilitate but which was driven by history. As such, it could be administered by Africans as well as Europeans. Unlike other justifications of empire, development came to have as strong an appeal to nationalist elites as to colonizers. In the end, Africans took over the development project along with the state apparatus built by the colonial regime, and the departing colonizers could convince themselves that their successors would inevitably trod the path they had laid out.
