The Cooperative Movement and British Colonial Technopolitics, 1900–40

We think of cooperatives as egalitarian social movements, but British imperial governments

used them as tools for rule. This paper focuses on the colonial technopolitics of cooperatives

and the cooperative movement. It explores how British officials, missionaries, and

international experts in India and Africa sought to resolve multiple perceived crises of social

change by planning the “rural reconstruction” of colonial societies through cooperatives and

community development. Officials represented their efforts to expand the cooperative

movement and to develop other self-help capacities within model villages as embodying a

new humanitarian footing for empire. They wanted cooperation and community development

to form the center of active life for the empire's version of the New Man and New Woman, the

entirety of whose political engagement was to focus on the uplift of the village through the

application of learned formulas of development. These would be defined and perennially

refined by colonial experts and officials, recasting the figure of the “man on the spot” as an

indispensable purveyor of technical advice. As the administrative infrastructure of cooperative

rural reconstruction was assembled empire-wide between 1904 and the mid-1940s, its

engineers revealed utopian possibilities for a permanent, post-imperial Commonwealth

founded on channels of producer-consumer cooperation and British-managed community

development. Indeed, during the final years of British imperial rule in India and Africa, the fact

that the colonial state aimed to expand the cooperative movement was often touted,

especially on the British Left, as proof of the efficacy of the British empire/Commonwealth as

custodian of social welfare projects. In addition to revealing the uses of cooperatives as part

of colonial technopolitics, the paper also points out important ways in which official

cooperative planning evolved against political movements that challenged the structures and

practices of colonial rule, including movements that targeted the colonial state's use of cooperatives.