The Hybridity of Colonial Knowledge: British Tropical Agricultural Science and African Farming Practices at the End of Empire

Abstract

This chapter examines the often ambiguous place of British tropical agricultural science and scientists in the late colonial enterprise. I wish to show that British agricultural resource experts — agronomists, soil scientists, plant ecologists, land use planners, entomologists and so forth — held diverse views that were shaped not only by British research traditions and institutional networks, but also by the local colonial contexts in which they worked, and that the differing views they held often led to vigorous policy debates, which could produce significant shifts in thinking about tropical environments and development. Moreover, this chapter suggests that the relationship between British tropical agricultural science and local indigenous knowledge and farming practices was more complex and reciprocal than previously assumed, and that this led over time to a certain level of hybridity, and in some cases to important critiques of previous theoretical assumptions that underpinned the field.

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