Week 2: The white man’s burden
DVST 6901: The global politics of development (Semester 2,
2026)
August 10, 2026
Classical models of development, no matter how they are voiced, are intrinsically ethnocentric because they posit a scale of civilization. Enlightenment concepts of the human pave the way for paternalistic humanitarianism
Main reading: Lorenzini (2019); Pedersen (2015); Lugard (1922)
Other reading: Rist (2014), chap. 3
Keywords
colonialism, indirect rule, the dual mandate, The League of Nations and the formation of an international system, ethnocentrism, evolutionism
Learning outcomes
- Understand the roots of contemporary approaches to development policy in European colonialism and the early formation of a system of international institutions dominated by colonial powers
- Understand the ethnocentric biases implicit in any notion of progress, modernity, or development, and the connection between this ideology and the unequal rules of the modern international system
Notes
In this week, we prepare to examine the contemporary political debates about the nature and implications of “developing” a society by first looking at the prehistory of contemporary international politics, specifically European imperialism. European empires were not uniform or constant. The thing about European imperialism is that, because it existed for so long, at any one moment, particularly in its late phases, everyone simply accepted it as a fact. For them, the question was how should people and societies operate within an imperial system and specifically how to break with older models of colonial control and replace them with new policies.
Patrick Wolfe is often quoted as saying colonialism is “a structure rather than an event” (e.g. Wolfe 2006, 390). This is true of settler colonialism (Wolfe’s main concern) and about extractive colonialism and other situations in which one society imposes itself on another. But to say that colonialism is a structure implies that it is a set of institutions and rules which we inherit. It is more accurate to say that colonialism is a set of prevailing conditions, like weather or climate in the sense that they are the implicit background to events, decisions, and actions. Unlike natural conditions, they are historical formations, and not inevitable or necessary. But for people in a colonial situation and for actors within an imperial period, there are a set of default assumptions that people make. Colonial oppression is as much of the mind and of people’s language for representing experience as it is of rules and policies, which are a reflection of the colonial conditions.
In Week 1, we touched on the idea that most contemporary models of development have a implicit bias in favor of Western ideas of progress, and that development can be seen as a kind of “neocolonialism.” This was a familiar idea to many people, and if you think about it, in contemporary discussions of global politics, it makes a kind of intuitive sense. But if it is true, then we actually have a bit of a puzzle to figure out. The closet link between 20th century ideas of development are late 19th century and early 20th century ideas of humanitarianism, the belief that all people and all human life has inherent dignity and deserves protection. Lugard’s ideas of indirect rule of certain kind of colonized peoples is his and his society’s effort to realize a humanitarian aim of protection and to break with what they saw as the evils of older colonial strategies and policies, namely chattel slavery and forced relocation. After the first World War, when the US and other colonial powers defeated Germany, another colonial power, they had to decide what responsibilities the powerful has to societies that had been subordinated with the German empire and which were, also, much less powerful than other societies. European imperialism, which for so long was simply accepted as fact, like the weather, now was competing for legitimacy with a new idea: a people’s collective right to self-determination. Yet, rights like this are easy to say but hard to do. To defend this right, the League of Nations instituted the Mandate system whereby one society would, in their words, be responsible for (or, rule over) other societies. Can colonialism be a means to decolonize colonies? The world