Scholar of the Month
September 2007
British Scholar is proud to present the September 2007 Scholar of
the Month Joseph Hodge.  Hodge is Assistant Professor of
History at West Virginia University.  His published works include:

- Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the
Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH:  Ohio University Press,
2007)

- “Science, Development and Empire: The Colonial Advisory Council
on Agricultural and Animal Health, 1929-1943” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 30, 1 (January 2002), 1-26.

1. Where, when, and why did you become interested in British history?

JH:  It is a long story. I began my graduate work at the University of
Guelph, Canada, where I completed a MA in comparative international
development studies and sociology, with a regional focus on East Africa.
The CIDS program, as we called it, was challenging and exciting, but after
three years of interdisciplinary studies, I became disenchanted, let us say,
with “development” as a set of national and international policy initiatives. I
sensed, as many other scholars and practitioners argued at the time, that
development theory was at a crossroads; the old theoretical paradigms
and models no longer held, yet there were no real alternatives. It seemed
to me that what was missing from the discussion was a solid
understanding of the broader historical, political, and institutional context
in which development as a pervasive set of ideas and practices first
emerged.  For most critics, it was assumed that development as a global
discourse began at the end of the Second World War with the emergence
of the United States as the dominant world power.  My sense of history
told me that the origins and problems went much deeper and that perhaps
the way out of the so-called impasse in development studies and theory
was to examine those origins more carefully and thoughtfully.  

I decided to apply to do my PhD in history, and to pursue this quest for
historical perspective further. This led me to study at Queen's University in
Kingston under Dr. Robert Shenton, who together with the late Dr. Michael
Cowen, was writing a book on the history of development doctrines in
Europe in the 19th century and subsequently in other regions of the world
from Australia and Canada to Kenya. Having already studied something
of the history of British colonial rule in East Africa, it seemed logical to
pursue my interest in examining development from a historical
perspective through the wider context of Britain and the British Empire in
the 19th and 20th centuries. It was in this way that I became interested in
British history, taking fields in British culture and society in the 19th and
early 20th centuries; British imperialism, with a focus on India and Africa;
and Irish history in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I should also say that I have acquired a greater appreciation and
understanding of the history of England, and more recently Scotland,
through my teaching. Both in my present post here at West Virginia
University, and at my previous institution, I have been responsible for
teaching courses on the entire scope of British history since the 17th
century. Since our graduate program is heavily oriented toward American
history, you find there are a lot of students doing American history who
want to know something about Britain and Ireland, especially in the early
modern period. I find the 17th and 18th century especially interesting to
teach. I get a kick out of teaching students the American Revolution from
the British perspective for example, and though I am by no means an
expert, I think the new focus on the Atlantic world is enriching and
stimulating.  

2. Who most influenced your academic development?

JH:  I would have to say my PhD adviser, Dr. Robert Shenton. Without a
doubt, as I have said in the acknowledgements to my book, it was Dr.
Shenton who really made me see (in his sometimes enigmatic and cryptic
way!) that development has had a long history; a history that few of us fully
understand. I still believe that, although I must say there is a growing
corpus of exciting new work now being done on the subject including
Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome and Amy Staples, The
Birth of Development. Scholars of U.S. diplomatic history such as
Michael Latham, Nick Cullather and Nils Gilman are also doing
fascinating work on the history of modernization.

3. If you hadn’t become a historian what career path would you have
chosen?

JH:  Honestly, probably a house painter! After I graduated from high
school, a couple of my close friends and I decided to start a painting
company together. With the help of a government student venture loan
and a beat up old telephone repair van, we kept the company running off
and on throughout our college years. It kept us ridiculously busy from May
to September and beyond every year, and at one point, we even had
several crews working for us and contemplated running the business full
time. In the end, I stayed in school and one thing led to another and I found
myself doing a PhD instead. I continued to paint houses though, even in
grad school, and when I graduated I found myself digging up the old
paintbrush and drop sheets once again, as an interim solution to paying
the bills while I searched for a full-time academic position. I still love to
paint, believe it or not, although now I limit myself to working on my own
house rather than other peoples.

4. What project are you currently working on?

JH:  I am currently working on two projects. The first is really a sequel to
Triumph. When I was researching the book, I spent a lot of time going
through the manuscripts and personal papers of colonial officials housed
at Rhodes House in Oxford as part of the Colonial Records/Oxford
Development Records Project. As I did, I noticed that many colonial
officers who were hired after the Second World War, say between 1945
and 1955 or so, mentioned that they ended up going on to work for
various international organizations like the UN or the World Bank, or else
for the ODM/ODA and other British donor agencies and consultancy firms
after they retired from HMOCS. I got the idea of charting their subsequent
careers as a way of exploring the transition from late colonialism to the
early post-colonial era. I call this my Post-Colonial Careers Project. So far
I have made contact with nearly 100 former colonial officials, mostly
technical officers from agriculture, forestry and other related fields, who
have agreed to participate in the project. Thus far, I have managed to
carry out oral history interviews with about 30 of them, and to begin
archival research this summer at the Library of Congress and the World
Bank Group Archives in Washington, D.C.  

The other thing I am involved with is a multi-disciplinary team project
looking at the relationship between livelihood and land use, both
historically and today, in Malawi (the former British colonial protectorate of
Nyasaland). The team consists of two geographers, an agricultural
economist, and a historian (myself). We were recently awarded a National
Science Foundation (NSF) grant to carry out the research over the next
two years. NSF has also provided additional funding in order for us to
bring senior undergraduate or early graduate students along to
participate in the fieldwork, which is scheduled to take place in the
summer of 2008. Ii is our plan to develop this research into an even
larger, multi-country study, looking at several former British colonies in
sub-Saharan and Southern Africa.

5. What projects do you see yourself working on in the near future?

JH:  Well, these two projects will keep me busy for quite some time! But
somewhere down the road, I would like to return to some research I began
while I was still a graduate student at Queen's. I wrote a couple of papers
on Henry Sumner Maine and his ideas about the village community and
land reform in 19th century India. These papers also looked at debates
about land tenure and property both in Ireland and England at the same
time. Maine's comparative historical method allowed him to draw some
important analogies between England and India that came to be
regarded as axioms of Victorian progress (and later, "modernization"
theory). There were others too, like Sir George Campbell, who were
comparing land tenure in India and Ireland around the same time. I would
like one day to return to the question of land and land reform, not just in
India and Ireland, but perhaps a whole history of the "land question" in
Britain and the empire and its legacies, from the enclosure movement to
post-Apartheid!  

6. Of your academic projects, which one has proven to be most fulfilling?

JH:  Well, I would have to say, they have all been rewarding in different
ways. I feel very privileged to be doing what I am doing. My
interdisciplinary background (history, sociology, development studies)
has allowed me to keep a foot in two camps. I remain very interested in
current environmental and development studies debates, as my work with
the Malawi Team attests. I think it is important for scholars to break down
academic barriers and compartments and to engage the ideas and
perspectives of their colleagues in other disciplines. I have for example
been collaborating closely with a geographer of South Africa, Dr. Brent
McCusker, looking at the history and legacy of Betterment planning and
forced removals in what is today the Central Limpopo Province. This
partnership has been very rewarding, helping me to see the problem not
only in historical terms, but spatially. I feel strongly that many
contemporary environmental and development policy debates would gain
greatly from a deeper historical and contextual understanding both of the
problems they seek solutions for, and of the practices that often follow.

On the other hand, I can't imagine not being a historian. One of my favorite
experiences recently has been driving all over England and Wales
conducting oral history interviews for my post-colonial careers project.
Almost all of the respondents are now in their seventies and eighties, and
in a few short years, many of them will pass away. In a way, they are the
last generation of colonial civil service officers, whose memories of the
last years of the British Empire are invaluable. How very fortunate I am
that they have been so willing to share their experiences and stories with
me! I plan to deposit the transcripts and related materials at Rhodes
House in due time.  

7. Where do you see the field of British history heading in the next few
years?

JH:  I would hope that the research agenda that has developed over the
last ten or fifteen years of integrating the history of Britain with the wider
history of its empire will continue to broaden and expand. I think that work
such as Richard Drayton's Nature's Government or Andrew Thompson's
The Empire Strikes Back? are excellent examples of the kind of
scholarship that might be pursued further. I would also like to see greater
dialogue between historians and other disciplinary approaches. It seems
to me that this is especially appropriate for historians of empire. Work
such as David Lambert and Alan Lester's Colonial Lives across the
British Empire, which uses a networked or webbed conception of
imperial space to examine the interconnections between colonial and
metropolitan places, projects and people, are very worthwhile and might
be extended beyond the 19th century to earlier or later time periods.
Finally, I hope to see more research done on the legacies of the British
Empire, both for British identity and society itself, and for the many
countries that were once former colonial territories. Though scholars such
as Stuart Ward have begun to explore the history of the decolonization of
British culture and identity, much remains to be done.   


8. What advice do you have for graduate students and beginning
academics about finding a topic of interest and publishing on it?

JH:  I remember when I first started the PhD program at Queen's and I
met for one of the first times with my supervisor, Robert Shenton. I wasn't
sure what I wanted to focus on, or even what kind of historian I wanted to
be. I wasn't sure if I should style myself more as an Africanist or British
imperial historian. You have to keep in mind that this was just before the
"imperial turn" in British history, and so to say you were a British imperial
historian was to conjure up images of dusty old men in tweed, smoking
pipes! At any rate, Shenton, told me to go with what I was most
passionate about and that the rest would take care of itself. I wasn't sure if
the rest would take care of itself, but I decided to follow his advice
anyways and concentrate my fields on Britain and British colonial history.
Stemming from my days as a Master's student in sociology and
anthropology, I had always been interested in the relationship between
anthropology and colonialism. Shenton suggested that I broaden the topic
a bit to look at, as he called it, the rise of the colonial expert, and he
mentioned that the Colonial Office had set up a whole slew of advisory
committees in the 20th century to help formulate policy; the records were
there just waiting for someone like myself to make use of them. That was
the beginning of my book, Triumph of the Expert, and it was also the
beginning of my career as a historian of the British Empire. Luckily for
me, I finished my doctorate just as the job market for historians with an
expertise in empire was opening up. So in the end Shenton was right, and
this is what I tell my own graduate students who come to me wondering
which direction they should be heading in.

As for publishing, I would say it is very important for graduate students
and junior academics to attend scholarly conferences, like the upcoming
British Scholar Conference or the AHA, and to go to the book fairs and
meet the publishers and editors. Find out what sort of themes and work
they are promoting, and if possible, have your supervisor or a more senior
colleague you know introduce you and your work to them!
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