University of California Press Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain's Late Empire: 20 (Berkeley Series in British Studies)

Product Description While many have interpreted the cooperative movement as propagating a radical alternative to capitalism, Cooperative Rule shows that in the late British Empire, cooperation became an important part of the armory of colonialism. The system was rooted in British rule in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Officials and experts saw cooperation as a unique solution to the problems of late colonialism, one able to both improve economic conditions and defuse anticolonial politics by allowing community uplift among the empire's primarily rural inhabitants. A truly transcolonial history, this ambitious book traces the career of cooperation from South Asia to Eastern and Central Africa and finally to Britain. In tracing this history, Windel opens the doors for a reconsideration of how the colonial career of cooperation and community development influenced the reimagination of community in Europe and America from the 1960s onward. From the Back Cover "This is a highly ambitious work that retells the history of Britain's efforts at mid-twentieth century colonial development through an examination of a set of institutions and practices associated with cooperatives. In its range, depth, and rethinking, the book pulls together a startling degree of both historial argument and carefully examined but distinctive cases."--Dr. L. Carol Summers, author of Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1935 . "Aaron Windel's erudition extends beyond a conventional British studies approach, diving deep into the terrain of the serious transnational practitioner. Its ambitions are many, and the arguments are there--of this there is no question. It will make an outstanding contribution to British studies, a field undergoing profound realignment for the modern period. This is a chastening and enlightening narrative."--Susan D. Pennybacker, Chalmers W. Poston Distinguished Professor of European History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill About the Author Aaron Windel is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University.