Cooperative Rule

Community Development in Britain's Late Empire

Aaron Windel author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:8th Feb '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Cooperative Rule cover

While many have interpreted the cooperative movement as propagating a radical alternative to capitalism, Cooperative Rule shows that in the late British Empire, cooperation became an important part of the armory of colonialism. The system was rooted in British rule in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Officials and experts saw cooperation as a unique solution to the problems of late colonialism, one able to both improve economic conditions and defuse anticolonial politics by allowing community uplift among the empire’s primarily rural inhabitants. A truly transcolonial history, this ambitious book examines the career of cooperation from South Asia to Eastern and Central Africa and finally to Britain. In tracing this history, Aaron Windel opens the door for a reconsideration of how the colonial uses of cooperation and community development influenced the reimagination of community in Europe and America from the 1960s onward.

"An electric account of the cooperative movement’s role in rural modernization. . . .an ambitious and clear-headed. . . .contribution to these literatures and to courses on colonial development, anti-colonial politics, and late imperial history." * H-Soz-Kult *
"[An] original book." * Contemporary British History *

ISBN: 9780520381872

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm

Weight: 499g

274 pages