Triumph of the Expert — 2007 ·

Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism

“Hodge brings to light the role that Britain’s imperial networks of applied scientific and technical experts played in shaping development throughout the twentieth century...with its emphases on agrarian concerns, technical solutions, and state intervention..... A pathbreaking historical study with important implications for understanding the current nature of international development.”

Journal of British Studies

“Hodge’s meticulous historical analysis and extraordinary synthesis of the relevant case literature are a remarkable feat.... a smart, well-written, and accessible book....”

American Historical Review

“Hodge provides an excellent analysis of the historical roots of the contradictions and problems associated with development.... Hodge’s important and insightful book will generate considerable rethinking of many assumptions usually taken for granted about the globalization project.”

International Review of History

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The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.

Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.