Barbara Ward and the Colonial Origins of Development

29 September 2020

We are delighted to host another guest blog this month, on Barbara Ward, illuminating the "fraught role European social democrats played in sterring the transition from 'colonial development' to 'international development"

One salutary effect of the history of women's international thought is to call into question what 'international thought' is. Historians have generally focused on a canon of familiar historical figures, or the discipline of International Relations. But given that women across the past have so often been marginalised from traditional centres of scholarship[1], to make the subject coterminous with those centres is to create the false impression that it has overwhelmingly been men who have thought meaningfully about the international. Part of our effort to recover the history of women's international thought has to involve going beyond the limits of canonical and disciplinary history, into genres, fields and professions in which women's voices have resounded[2].

Barbara Ward (1914-1981) is a case in point. She wrote about world politics across the span of her life, but outside of the guardrails of International Relations, as a historian, political economist and developmentalist. Less scholar than 'public moralist'[3], she roamed widely: moving from Foreign Editor of the Economist, to advisor to Kwame Nkrumah and John F. Kennedy, to Professor of International Economic Development at Columbia, to catalytic voice in a series of major UN conferences. The upshot, today, is that she has fallen outside the net of historians.

Ward has not entirely escaped remembrance[4]. But what has been written of her life comes in the form of tribute and biography, not historical analysis. She is primarily remembered as a pioneer of international development. David Satterthwaite has highlighted Ward's role in shaping several pivotal events in the modern aid regime - the Pearson Commission (1968), UN World Food Conference (1974), and Brandt Report (1980). Almost nothing, however, has been said of the intellectual project Ward pursued over the first half of her career, of her views on socialism, world history and empire, and how Ward's commitment to aid and development emerged from these concerns.

Ward's formation owes most to Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History. Like many after the First World War, Toynbee reimagined world history in the light of Europe's diminution by inverting the standard of its grandeur: civilization. The West is but one civilization among many, and the study of past civilizations suggests that it is expiring. Toynbee achieved this reversal by reviving the pre-modern idea of history as a metabolic process of growth and decay. Civilizations are a species abiding a common life-cycle. Like other organisms, their survival depends on their adaptation to challenges. But the ability of a civilization to meet a given challenge cannot be predicted ex ante because adaptation is propelled by life's spontaneous creativity - Henri Bergson's élan vital. Toynbee was therefore able to vacillate between the overwhelming fact that all civilizations have fallen, and the hope that the West might yet resolve the contradictions destroying it by creatively forging a global polity.

Ward commemorated in Royal Mail's Remarkable Lives series, 2014. Image courtesy of © Stamp Design Royal Mail Group Ltd.

Ward belongs to a post-war generation who cast Western decline in relation to the Soviet Union. Ward saw communism as a 'cancer' feeding upon the decaying tissue of the West, growing in strength in proportion to its weakness[5]. The only real solution was the creative remaking of the West itself. Ward set out this programme in a quartet of books: The West at Bay (1948), Policy for the West (1951), Faith and Freedom (1954), and The Interplay of East and West (1957). Two issues loomed largest.

First, for Ward as for the Attlee government, the dominant fact around which all policy had to be organised was the 'dollar gap'. Socialist prosperity depended on it. Emerging from the Second World War with its production shattered, Europe had to rely on American imports to make up the resulting shortfall in output, draining the continent of dollars. Ward joined Labour in denying that this was a temporary dislocation that could be seamlessly followed by the reintroduction of free trade. Rather, it reflected the structural difference between Britain and the United States as the centre of international trade[6]. Where the former's paucity of natural resources meant that its export of manufactures was balanced by a commensurate need to import primary materials, the latter's continental wealth meant that it had no parallel need for imports.

Europe could soften the deficit, but it could not eliminate it. It had only been kept afloat by American beneficence: through Lend-Lease, its 1946 loan to Britain, and until 1952 through the Marshall Plan. For Ward, the only solution was the institutionalisation of this emerging principle of mutual support through the economic integration of the North Atlantic powers. Dependence led naturally to union.

Second, Ward shares Toynbee's assumption that creativity, and thus the health of civilizations, expresses itself on the cultural plane. But here Ward's ardent Catholicism separates her from the historical relativism to which A Study of History frequently tends. Civilizations are the basic units of world politics, but they are far from equal[7].

'Archaic civilizations' saw the laws of human society as fixed parts of nature, creating an inert social form reproduced from one generation to the next through ritual, and ruled over by despots ordained by fate. Lacking the free creativity necessary to meet new challenges, these civilizations reveal a cyclical tendency to rise and fall. The 'world religions' born in the axial age broke this philosophical barrier. By reimagining God as a creator standing beyond nature, they were able to conceive of a just order transcending the given. But only Christianity identified the true lesson of this discovery: that humans are free beings capable of remaking the temporal realm to move progressively closer to God's word. It is this which marks out the West as 'the most radical transformation of the human scene since man became recognizably man': it alone has been able to break from cyclism to creatively shape its own life[8].

Scientific materialism, treating human life as a play-thing of material forces, is the ultimate cause of Western decline. Puncturing the West's 'faith in freedom', it has stunted its ability to creatively meet the challenges of the age. Marxism is both an outgrowth of the materialism of the West, and a throwback to the ingrained despotism of the East, traceable to the influx of 'oriental influences' into Byzantium[9].

Ward at Smith College, 1949. Image courtesy of © Time Inc.

Ward's proposal for the 'West' to develop the 'East' emerged at the convergence of these two arguments. Europe's trade deficit with America could be cushioned if 'new areas of exploitation in Africa and Asia' were opened up, unlocking non-dollar imports[10]. If the West alone has discovered freedom, the 'free world' in Asia can only be saved from communist subversion - and itself - by Westernisation.

What is now called 'international development' was first known as colonial development. In the 1920s under the League Mandates that meant little more than the Open Door and free labour, and in practice forced labour was pervasive[11]. Private and public investment alike were scarce. But on the other side of the Keynesian revolution, confronting fierce labour unrest in the colonies, social democrats sought to relegitimate empire by adopting schemes for state-led colonial development[12].

Google Ngram search for 'international development' and 'colonial development', 1920-1965.

Ward stood at the crest of this transition. Both the strength and weakness of the British Empire was that it was created in the crucible of private initiative[13]. It served to 'create self-governing communities and to endow them with liberal institutions evolved in Britain', while leaving economic development to the hazards of enterprising individuals. Ward saw development as the tail-end of an evolutionary story about empire. Britain had brought its colonies halfway into modernity, but it was now its responsibility to consummate this process by superintending a scheme of state-led development. Ward's proposal was ambitious: a fifty-year development programme financed by 1% of the annual GDP of Western nations[14].

Ward originally saw development as a responsibility of colonial trusteeship[15]. But in 1952 she backed independence on the largely strategic grounds that it was necessary to nix the Soviet Union's anti-imperial allure. Yet 'Asiatic nationalism' made for unreliable allies among the continent's fledgling states[16]. In Burma and India, it fuelled sectarian violence; in China and Indochina, communist revolution. 'Must American or British or French or Dutch administrators move in and take over?', Ward asked. Such a direct solution would be 'politically impossible', but if 'these same administrators were formed into United Nations teams responsible to the Economic and Social Council and their impact upon local conditions could be made in the name of an international organization', it could be made palatable.

Modernization was one thing, however, Westernisation another. The first could only lead to the second via religion. Ward entertained the idea of a global religious revival. In Faith and Freedom, she imagined the assimilation of the other world religions, birthing an 'Asian Christianity'[17]. Ward shifts register in The Interplay of East and West, calling for syncretism[18]. Yet Ward simultaneously reaffirms Christianity's preternatural freedom: truth continues to move from West to East.

Where does this leave us? Ward's outlook was formed in the 1930s, and her imperial apologia is redolent of interwar figures like Alfred Zimmern, Lionel Curtis and Toynbee. E.H. Carr's excoriation of Toynbee's euphemisms - equating Britain's interests with the world's - could well be extended to Ward[19]. Her calls for global redistribution, ahead of their time, were bounded by monological Catholicism. Ward is also an instructive case study in the fraught role European social democrats played in steering the transition from 'colonial development' to 'international development'. For Ward, that transition was not a break- it was an evolution.

[1] A few examples indicate the trend. The University of Oxford did not allow women to matriculate until 1920, the University of Edinburgh appointed its first female Professor in 1958, and the first woman to hold a Chair at the University of Glasgow came as late as 1973.

[2] Valeska Huber, Tamson Pietsch, Katharina Rietzler, 2019, 'Women's International Thought and the New Professions, 1900-1940', Modern Intellectual History.

[3] Stefan Collini, 1991, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

[4] David Satterthwaite, 2006, Barbara Ward and the Origins of Sustainable Development. International Institute for Environment and Devlopment: London, UK; Jean Gartlan, 2010, Barbara Ward: Her Life and Letters. Continuum: London, UK.

[5] Barbara Ward, 1951, Policy for the West. Penguin: Middlesex, UK, pp. 21-24, 252-253.

[6] Barbara Ward, 1948, The West at Bay. Norton: New York, USA, pp. 24-25, 30-32; Ward, Policy for the West, p. 177.

[7] Barbara Ward, 1954, Faith and Freedom: A Study of Western Society. Hamish Hamilton: London, UK.

[8] Ward, Policy for the West, p. 246.

[9] Ward, Faith and Freedom, pp. 58-59.

[10] Ward, The West at Bay, p. 252; Ward, Policy for the West, pp. 214-215.

[11] Susan Pederson, 2015, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, Ch. 8.

[12] Frederick Cooper, 1997 'Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept', in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences. University of California Press: Berkley, USA; Talbot Imlay, 2017, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, Ch. 9.

[13] Barbara Ward, 1957, 'Britain's Imperial Legacy', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 412-421.

[14] Ward, Policy for the West, p. 92.

[15] Ward, The West at Bay, pp. 47-49.

[16] Ward, Policy for the West, pp. 55-57, 238.

[17] Ward, Faith and Freedom, p. 267.

[18] Barbara Ward, 1957, The Interplay of East and West: Points of Conflict and Cooperation. Norton: New York, USA, p. 137.

[19] E.H. Carr, 2001, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939. Palgrave: Hampshire, UK, pp. 72-73, 150-151.