The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdeveloped. The scale and intensity of development interventions increased dramatically, and a language of planned development, undergirded by ‘science’, came to frame the policy debates of colonial administrators and the technical experts they relied on, as well as nationalists and local elites. But development had been a central feature of encounters between the West and Africa since at least the early twentieth century, so that by the 1950s, all parties involved in the encounter had substantial experience of its policies and practices. Using detailed ethnohistorical and archival data, the papers in this special issue examine development programs in the late colonial period from across the continent in order to analyze how such historical experiences contributed to the conceptualization, implementation and outcomes of these programs.

These papers, like much recent research on development, explore development discourses and the ways in which experts and government officials defined particular development problems and conceptualized solutions. But in examining particular development programs across Africa, these papers seek to bring development practice into the analysis of development discourse. Rather than situating persistence and change in development discourses largely within dominant international and government institutions, these papers argue that such discourses were inevitably intertwined with development practice. In considering the local configurations within which experts and officials sought to implement their ambitious master plans, these papers show that few if any plans remained uninfluenced by local struggles over land, labor or agricultural and environmental expertise. Neither hegemonic nor unchanging, late colonial development agendas were in fact rooted in the experiences of earlier colonial efforts to manage rural livelihoods and tied to both the global changes and local realities of the late colonial era.