This essay discusses British discourses and efforts to regulate social policy in both urban and rural areas in late colonial Tanzania. It focuses mainly on questions of social security and especially on the vague concept of social welfare and development, which after the Second World War became a favoured means of expressing a new imperial commitment to colonial people. The British were very reluctant about implementing international standards of social security in Tanganyika, mainly due to the insight that the cost of providing European-scale benefits could not be borne by the colonial regime in such a poor territory. They were far more enthusiastic in pursuing a policy of social development, embodied in social welfare centres and various other schemes. It is argued that in Tanzania, this policy remained focused on peasantization rather than on proletarianization and was characterized by a disconnection between Colonial Office mandarins in London, attempting to create bourgeois, respectable African middle classes, and colonial officials in Tanganyika, seeking to maintain the political legitimacy of the chiefs and headmen. Most Africans ignored rather than challenged many of these state efforts. However, the nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under Julius Nyerere believed in these programmes and continued such dirigiste and poorly financed improvement schemes after independence.