One of the most striking features of the work of the Development Division of the BMEO in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s is its awareness of the limitations to promoting growth. This attitude found its roots in the various failures and frustrations of the immediate postwar period, especially in Iran and Iraq. These frustrations continued in Jordan as shown by the struggles to scale down the extent of development policy in the fields of forestry and irrigation. However, the addition of a modest aid budget in Jordan combined with the continuation of a waning but still influential British diplomatic presence in the country gave the BMEO a chance to implement its own counter-approach, based on the premise that sustainable economic progress would best evolve from small-scale, incremental changes. As Crawford stated in a letter to the Foreign Office justifying the rather unspectacular approach of his band of technicians in that country: ‘For years, development in the Middle East has been bedeviled by the fetish of long-term planning for large development works. The Village Loans Scheme … [is] proof that development in the Middle East is generally at its best when it is the sum of a number of smaller projects.’ For the BMEO, small-scale development held out several advantages. It reduced the possibility that British assistance would become the target of political opposition and, therefore, allowed for a more unfettered environment within which to work. It also allowed a country like Jordan with limited capacity, financial and otherwise, to assume greater responsibility for its own development, thus promoting, in a gradual way, self-reliance.