Did the League of Nations Invent Development? The Cases of China and India

At the end of the Second World War, bringing economic prosperity and “modernization” to the Third World became an important focus of U.S. foreign policy and a major preoccupation of economists across the globe. Most histories of development tend to focus on this post-1945 period and on the context of U.S. Cold War policy-making. This paper attempts to refocus and re-periodize this historiography by looking at the League of Nations’s economic work in early 1930s China and India – the first instance, I argue, of an international organization taking responsibility for the economic development of regions outside of Europe. It focuses, in particular, on the missions of Arthur Salter, head of the League’s Economic and Financial Section, to China and India in early 1931 and on his efforts to bring to Asia new European forms of economic expertise. These League missions ultimately aimed at establishing national economic advisory councils in China and India to plan and coordinate the countries’ industrial development.

By showing how League experts imagined nationalist China and colonial India as sites for experimentations in new forms of technocratic governance and economic planning, this paper provides insight into how the task of managing a national economy was imagined before the “Keynesian Revolution,” when it became standard for states, around the world, to employ economists to shape policy. These efforts by the League were not fully successful: in India, they were resisted by British colonial officials, who worried that creating an economic council would democratize policy-making in India and thus destabilize colonial rule. But they unintentionally provided publicity to calls by Indian nationalists for economic planning and national industrialization. This paper concludes by considering the impact of these failed League efforts on the development of the economic planning initiatives that would shape the technocratic politics of postcolonial India.