Historians of the late British Empire in Asia and Africa have long made perfunctory reference to the wide-ranging reference to the cooperative movement, seeing in it both a reworking of techniques of rule in the late colonial economy and the origins of developmental thought in the postcolonial world. Lucid, fine-grained, and moored in sedulous archival work, Aaron Windel’s Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire offers an electric account of the cooperative movement’s role in rural modernization, casting colonial exhortations to pool resources, share risk, and redistribute gains as „a strategy of imperial rescue and colonial rule.“ (p. 1) Tracing an expansive late colonial history and its afterlives in the postcolonial world, Windel advances a convincing account of how strategies of imperial rule provided the scaffolding for a wide range of anti-colonial projects of development and uplift.

Windel’s account spans geographies, beginning in the domestic British context and following community development and cooperative idioms to India, Malaya, and Palestine. It draws the core of its evidentiary basis, however, from the East African context, where late colonial development was sutured most tightly to the extraction of agricultural commodities. It was in these migrations that „cooperative rule“ – a phrase borrowed from Lord Frederick Lugard, governor of Nigeria and a frequently-involved theorist of colonial dominion – emerged as a sort of imperial technopolitics. Colonial cooperatives, Windel argues, were braided together with techniques of indirect rule, weaving a scaffolding of rural uplift projects designed to support and sustain empire in its final half-century. Cooperatives, Windel shows, „were called upon to solve crises that authorities saw as threatening the colonial order,“ (p. 2) entering into a dynamic range of colonial domains. Ultimately, however, these cooperatives provided the raw material for anti-colonial bound to questions of rural uplift.

The core of Cooperative Rule is divided into two main parts, roughly corresponding to the birth and spread of cooperative techniques and idioms before the Second World War (and India’s formal decolonization) and the decades afterwards, ending roughly in the early 1960s. Its opening chapter traces the migration of a particular form of cooperative control, developed by the Indian Civil Service in Punjab that was exported elsewhere in the empire. Windel traces the „rural-sociological study and advice tours“ made by Claude Strickland, former head of the Punjab’s Cooperative Department, to Malaya, Palestine, and East and West Africa in the 1920s, as the colonial bureaucrat argued the case for a „reconstruction“ of African society through cooperatives. Windel offers a „postcolonial“ reading of Strickland’s vision for colonial society and the economic and political subject that cooperative rule was meant to produce.

In the book’s second chapter, Windel examines the formative role of missionary educators in the context of British East and Central Africa, where a village teacher training system and a mobile instructional cinema experiment provided missionaries with the opportunity to concretize a vision for community development. These experiments, Windel shows, were undertaken within the context of fears of political crisis, and the rising crest of African political moments threatening to stymie these projects, and the project of Christian missions in Africa writ large.

Cooperative Rule’s third and fourth chapters, moving beyond the Second World War, zero in on the engrossing and illustrative case of an anti-colonial cooperative movement in Uganda in the 1940s and the 1950s. It is in these chapters that Windel develops his most sustained arguments around the transformation of cooperative politics, showing how the inconsistencies and contradictions of colonial technocratic visions could be remade into the fodder for potent anti-colonial politics. In the book’s third chapter, Windel charts the rise of a Ugandan farmers’ movement. Focused on the regional concerns of tens of thousands of cotton and coffee farmers, this movement quickly animated broader calls for democratic reforms in government and goods marketing. In the subsequent chapter, Windel charts the anti-colonial journeys of the unlicensed Uganda African Farmers Union. Its organization of a boycott of state-led marketing led to the colonial government’s banning the Union under emergency powers, and Cold War-imbricated allegations from bureaucrats in London and Entebbe that the Union itself was the front for communist conspiracy. Windel traces the movements of Union leaders and colonial bureaucrats in both Uganda and the United Kingdom; this impressive archival recovery midwives a sophisticated argument about the inversion of cooperative politics by anticolonial actors, with resonances elsewhere in the late British Empire.

Finally, the book’s last chapter follows recent historiographic efforts to trace the afterlives of decolonial and anticolonial politics in following the cooperative movement back to Britain in the post-war years. Windel foregrounds the tensions between the self-image of the British-led cooperative movement and its efforts to cast itself as an instructive model for newly-independent states and the reality of racism and revanchist imperialism within the movement itself. If British claims that cooperatives had been essential to its own democracy were leveraged in the service of similar expectations for postcolonial states, uglier realities like the linkages between the cooperative movement and apartheid South Africa belied these lofty ideals, and the failed efforts of activists to severe these ties evidenced „the fallacy of thinking of the British cooperative movement as a natural ally to a project of decolonization that linked independence, development, and racial equality.“ (p. 18)

The book’s pivot back to Britain in the last chapter is a dynamic one, yet leaves open a set of questions as to how cooperative politics – and indeed, the project of „cooperative rule“ more broadly – have been leveraged in the postcolonial contexts, as well. The core historiographic mechanism in the central chapters of this book – the co-opting of late colonial claims about labor and welfare – has been central to a wide range of essential accounts of the making of popular anticolonial politics.1 But the long afterlives of cooperative idioms and institutions in Africa and India are treated relatively quickly here; future scholars will no doubt follow these threads productively.

Precise in its argumentation and exhaustive in its archival moorings, Cooperative Rule is an ambitious and clear-headed account of the ways which the cooperative movement percolated through the late empire, gave fodder to those seeking to recast colonial economics as a project of rural uplift, and animated a heady range of anti-colonial politics. The book’s primary focus on the African experience and connections to Britain render it of particular interest to those working on East African colonial contexts in particular, but historians of India, Malaya, and Palestine will no doubt draw ready connections with their own areas. The book implicitly connects a heady set of new work on late colonial projects of rural uplift, technopolitics in late empire, and the birth of humanitarian ideologies in the postcolonial Anglophone world; it will be a valuable contribution to these literatures and to courses on colonial development, anti-colonial politics, and late imperial history.

Note:
1 This book, like my own first one, owes much to Frederick Cooper’s work. See, Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society. The Labor Question in French and British Africa, Cambridge 1996; Benjamin Siegel, Hungry Nation. Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, Cambridge 2018.