Abstract
IN a memorandum issued with the first report of the Select Committee on Estimates for the session 1948-49*, the Colonial Office replies to some earlier criticisms by the committee suggesting that there was no coherent stategy of economic planning in the schemes for Colonial development which had been put forward. The Colonial Office in its reply refers to an unpublished memorandum of April 1944 on "The Planning of Social and Economic Development in the Colonial Governments", which states that the two primary objectives of British Colonial policy are the promotion of the best development of the social and political institutions of Colonial peoples, and of their true welfare in the widest sense. The memorandum assumes that the planning of developments to be undertaken in the Colonies would be 'outline' planning in the sense of providing a general framework while leaving a more or less substantial residue of decisions about production and consumption to private planning or individual initiative. On this interpretation of planning, in which strategy is defined as the selection of objectives and the marshalling of the forces necessary to reach those objectives, the Colonial Office submits that there has been a perfectly coherent strategy. The reply goes on to point out that from the beginning it was made clear that the ten-year 'developments' were not to be imposed from Whitehall, but were to be the creation of Colonial Governments and indeed of Colonial peoples themselves. The execution of the plans and the tactics employed are then defended, but in a way which is not altogether convincing.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Development of Backward Tropical Regions. Nature 163, 341–343 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163341a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163341a0