Date of Graduation

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Committee Chair

Robert Maxon

Committee Co-Chair

Joseph Hodge

Committee Member

Joseph Hodge

Committee Member

Cyanne E Loyle

Committee Member

Tamba M'bayo

Committee Member

Robert Maxon

Committee Member

James Siekmeier

Abstract

The period after the Second World War was a significant moment in British colonialism in Nigeria. It was the height of the decolonization movements in many of Britain's colonial holdings and was the cradle of what David Low and J. M. Lonsdale call the "second colonial occupation." This occupation in which the British government carried out expansive development policies was an intentional attempt to wrestle with social unrest due to the neglect of the social welfare of the people during the Great Depression and in the period thereafter. Such a development vision was represented by the passage of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act. Unfortunately, the implementation of this act was interrupted by the war. After the war, this act was updated and passed in 1945. With a fund of £120 million earmarked for development in the colonies, this represented the single greatest financial investment by the British government in the colonies. Each of the colonies were asked to produce ten-year development plans. The plan that was produced by Nigeria depicts an important starting point in development planning and it reflected an agrarian bias. Several other plans have been produced since the 1945 plan. My study focuses on the 1945 plan and the 1962 plan which was the first post-independence national plan.;This study particularly looks at the process that resulted in the plan documents. This is important because it helps to reveal the factors that led to the success or failure of development plans. The planning process shows us that outcomes do not always reveal intentions and it is important not to use the outcomes to judge intentionality. This work argues that the failure of late colonial development in Nigeria was not as a result of bad intentions but because of the racial limitations inherent in the colonial state. Such limitations led to the exclusion of Africans in the development process and in the rejection of indigenously produced knowledge. A case study of the Niger Agricultural Project, Mokwa treated in the fourth chapter sheds light on the importance of local knowledge to the development process.;This study also reveals that persons and institutions matter in the development process. These reflect the human side of development. This dissertation shows how the feuds and conflicts between the technical departments and the political wing of the colonial state affected the 1945 colonial plan. The 1962 plan suffered because of conflicts between the main architect of the plan, Wolfgang Stolper, and the World Bank advisor to the prime minister, Narayan Prasad.;This work also shows that despite the rhetorical claims of modernization theorists such as Walt Rostow and his colleagues at CIS, in practice, modernization theorists continued colonial development policies. In Nigeria, the 1962 plan that was designed by US social scientists such as Stolper continued the agrarian bias that was emblematic of colonial development. The study concludes that both the colonial and early "postcolonial" plans were affected by five factors: development ideology, human resources, financial resources, International experts/indigenous knowledge, and corruption.

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