The politics of campaign. Temporal and spatial configurations of colonial governmentality in the British colonies of eastern Africa, 1919-1960

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Pesek
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442816767

This project is concerned with campaigns in the British colonies of Eastern Africa since the First World War up to the end of colonial rule in the 1960s which were aimed at the improvement of public health, education and the living standards of Africans. Campaigns were highly invasive forms of colonial politics. They were, however, limited in their temporal and spatial approach. The project starts with the assumption that the colonial state was limited in its access to and control of African societies. The colonial state lacked the resources and, in many cases, even the will to establish tighter control of its subjects and to implement its politics into the everyday lives of Africans. With the end of the First World War, Britain colonial rule in Eastern Africa changed its character from a regime of conquest to a regime of development. Campaigns to improve the social situations of Africans were major events in this transformation. The project considers campaigns as a particular form of colonial governmentality, which rather sought to solve narrowly defined problems than to initiate a more profound institutional change of the colonial state and its politics. In this regard, the project describes campaigns as a laboratory, in which the colonial state experimented with new approaches of biopolitics. The relationships between campaigns and long-term processes of change in British colonial politics in the region after the First World War till the end of colonial rule in the 1960s is a central question of the project. Campaigns as a focus of inquiry help to get a better understanding of the often-inconsistent colonial politics stuck within the contradictions between the conservatism of Indirect Rule and the new paradigms of modernization that increasingly gained attraction in colonial circles. Campaigns, moreover, shed the light onto a set of actors of colonial politics hitherto barley considered by historians. For its campaigns, the colonial state recruited and sought the support of scientists and experts from other parts of the empire and from international organizations. Those external actors had often different agendas and understandings of colonial politics that potentially conflicted with the agenda of the colonial state. The project attempts to establish the ways knowledge and concepts circulated between the different actors who participated in the campaigns. The aim is to explore the emergence of a transnational and global culture of experts that can been seen a s major contribution to the emergence of colonial and post-colonial development policies. Describing campaigns as a shared field of engagements and entanglement of different actors, the project offers a new way to connect colonial history and the history of science and knowledge

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Tanzania
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Oswald Masebo