Welfare spending in colonies aimed to cool anger, not raise living standards

Evidence

Despite the arguments of the UK Treasury, which warned against creating a colonial ‘dole’, the Colonial Office successfully won passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), which enabled metropolitan spending on water, health, housing and education in the colonies. The act was predicated on a social theory that assumed improved standards of living and social services would succeed in ‘cooling colonial anger and restoring imperial honour’. This gave a progressive gloss to colonial rule, as state supervision and planning were portrayed as necessary to protect the people of the colonies from market fluctuations. The reality, in the context of the war, was starkly different: real wages in African cities were plummeting, and colonial governments were more focused on lifting productivity than on raising the living standards of the people they governed. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 238

Categorization

• QUESTION: The gap between the progressive gloss and wartime reality of falling real wages is worth chasing — what data exists on wartime African urban wage declines?
• XREF: connects to: Colonial exploitation funded welfare rights in the metropolis — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 237

Broader Connections

• Colonial exploitation funded welfare rights in the metropolis #complicates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 237