In the 1940s and ‘50s, the East African Groundnut Scheme was infamous to the British public, and to the wider world, as both a development and financial disaster and a political scandal. It was brought into being by the post-war Labour Government at almost the same time as the National Health Service. But while the one became an outstanding success, widely admired throughout the world, the other was a disastrous failure. Today, the extraordinary story of the conception, initiation and failure of the scheme lies buried, lost and forgotten, another failed legacy of colonialism. Yet there are good reasons to dig it up and tell this story again, for a new audience.

First, the Groundnut Scheme was the most ambitious development project ever undertaken by the British Government in any of its colonies. It was launched in the new dawn of colonial development that followed the Second World War, and was intended as a flagship enterprise to show how African agriculture could be transformed, a core objective of British colonial development thinking at the time. Given the scale and importance of the scheme, a detailed study is fully justified to understand the intellectual and practical context that gave rise to it, the development thinking that drove it, and the reasons it proved such a spectacular failure.

But the history of the scheme also illuminates a number of wider issues. For one thing, it exposes to plain sight the workings of British imperialism in its final, declining phase. What indeed was the purpose of the empire after the Second World War? The war itself had demonstrated that one of its fundamental purposes was to support the metropolis in its hour of need. This continued into the post-war period. But both periods also reveal the domestic and international constraints on colonial rule. The Groundnut Scheme, as a study of British imperialism in operation, therefore also helps us understand how the mind and the sinews of empire worked.

It also casts an interesting, almost contemporary, light on British politics in the 1940s. The post-war Labour Government of Clement Attlee has taken on a hallowed, almost mythic status in the public imagination.