Ecological concepts of development? The case of colonial Zambia

The green revolution as a process of global circulation: plants, people and practices

“…We know, for example, that the agroecological approaches to plant breeding pursued in both Sri Lanka and Bengal in the 1950s had been developed in both places between the wars (Pain, 1986). Furthermore, during the 1930s some ecologists in Northern Rhodesia were impressed by the fact that peasant farmers took their environment into account when devising cultivation methods (Speek, 2014). And among the early pioneering work by anthropologists on indigenous agriculture sys-24.…”

Trapnell's Upper Valley Soils of Zambia: the production of an integrated understanding of geomorphology, pedology, ecology and land use

“…The significance and novelty of Trapnell's work, using an ecological model to support inference about soils and agricultural practices in extensive survey, has been recognized (e.g. Young, 2017), and the wider significance of an ecological survey as a basis for a certain understanding of colonial development has been explored by Bowman (2011) and Speek (2014). However, Trapnell's work has been treated as something of a curiosity in the history of soil science, a side-note to the account of pedology in British Tropical Africa which is focused on the East African Soil Map .…”

“…McEwen, the colony's chief agricultural research officer attributed to a lack of knowledge of plant ecology in the Zambian environment (Speek, 2014). The acting director of agriculture in the new colony, John Smith, reflecting the changing focus of attention to African farming, initiated two linked research projects in 1927: field experiments on African shifting cultivation methods led by Unwin Moffat, and a programme of ethno-agrobotany undertaken by T.C.…”

“…Key to this were recommendations from R. Bourne, of the Imperial Forestry Institute at Oxford University, for a multi-disciplinary team of geologists, foresters and agriculturalists with good knowledge of the local flora, to undertake an ecological survey aided by air photography. There was gen-eral support in Northern Rhodesia for the survey, but this concealed divergent understandings of its purpose and the general shape of the policy it would enable (Speek, 2014). Bourne was of the view that European cultivation should be discouraged, and that Africans would be the main agents in development of land resources.…”

“…The bid for EMB support was unsuccessful, but the proposal was developed with technical input from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which emphasized both the potential to identify land for export crops, and to base development in a young colony on a scientific survey undertaken before the widespread impact of settlement or change in African farming methods (Speek, 2014). H.C. Sampson, economic botanist at Kew, stated that the survey should entail 'enquiry into indigenous agricultural practice such as crops, varieties, soils, seasons, and their association one with the other and with the natural vegetation.'…”