‘Cinderella of the Empire?’: development policy in Bechuanaland in the 1930s

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Abstract
This paper examines development policy in colonial Botswana in the 1930s. It rejects the conventional characterisation of this period as either one of unremitting neglect or deliberate underdevelopment. Charles Rey, Resident Commissioner at the time, responded to the collapse of the old economic system — never very supportive of high nutritional standards — with a comprehensive development strategy focusing on water resources and the revival of the cattle industry. Under his command the local state was neither slothful nor a prisoner of capital, but worked actively to enhance production and organize exchange. In these efforts and in its attitudes to oscillating migrant labour and the issue of political transfer, it sought to secure the best deal for the territory, which often entailed opposing, rather than serving, South African capitalists. Rey's intention was to promote a large, prosperous ‘middle’ peasantry. The fact that his development projects instead enhanced socio‐economic differentiation is evidence, not of underdevelopment, but rather of the uneven development of capitalism in Botswana. The development policy, along with programmes of administrative reorganization and political reform, confirmed Botswana's autonomy, and the Territory, until then an imperial ‘envelope’ of heterogeneous African polities, began to assume the character of a coherent state. The foundations for a democratic capitalist order were laid in this period.

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