West Virginia University

Dr. Joseph Hodge

Director of Graduate Studies, Assistant Professor

Hodge in Malawi

Teaching Fields:

British history (since 1603), British Imperial history, historiography

Contact:

Joseph Hodge
202D Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5249
Fax: (304) 293-3616
Joseph.Hodge@mail.wvu.edu

  • Degrees

      Ph.D., History, Queen’s University at Kingston, ON, Canada, 1999
      M.A., Sociology & International Development Studies, University of Guelph, ON, Canada, 1993
      B.A., History, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 1990, with honor

  • Research Interests

      My research contributes to three broadly defined areas of historical scholarship: the history of ‘development’ both as a set of ideas and state practices in the former British colonies and post-colonial nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean; the history of science and experts in the former British colonies, particularly in the areas of tropical medicine, education, anthropology, ecology and agriculture; and comparative environmental history (conservation practices, land use management, and agricultural development) both in Britain and the colonies, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In my book, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism, I examine the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. The most striking feature of British colonialism in the 20th century, I argue, was the increasing use of science and expertise, joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop the natural and human resources of the empire. In the wake of the Great Depression, the possibility of planned, rational state intervention helped reinvigorate the imperial mission, inspiring a far-reaching process of policy reform that was given further urgency by the onset of the Second World War. The new initiative generated an immense need for new kinds of knowledge and organization, making late British colonial imperialism, in many ways, an imperialism of science, technology and the authority of experts.

      I am currently working on two new 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 Oxford Colonial/Development Records Project. As I did, I noticed that many colonial officers who were hired after the Second World War between 1945 and 1960, mentioned that they ended up going on to work for various international organizations like the UN or the World Bank, or else for the British overseas donor agencies and consultancy firms after they retired. The study thus seeks to chart their subsequent, post-colonial careers as a way of exploring the transition from late colonialism to the early post-colonial era. 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 participated in the project, and I have managed to carry out oral history interviews with about 30 of them. I have also begun archival research in London and Washington, D.C., and hope to eventually produce a second book manuscript.

      The other project I am involved with is a multi-disciplinary team study looking at the relationship between livelihood and land use, both historically and today, in southern 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 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. The long-range plan is to develop this research into an even larger, multi-country study, looking at several former British colonies in sub-Saharan and Southern Africa.

  • Grad Students Advised

  • Courses Offered

      102 West Civilization since 1600
      293 Britain since 1603
      432 17th and 18th Century Britain
      493R Modern British Empire
      700 Historiography
      793R Readings in British Imperial History
      793Z Research Seminar in British Imperial History

  • Publications

      Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism, Series in Ecology and History, Series Editor: James L.A. Webb Jr, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).

      “British Colonial Expertise, Postcolonial Careering and the Early History of International Development,” in: Corinna Unger and Stephan Malinowski (eds.), Journal of Modern European History, Special Issue: Modernizing Mission – Approaches to ‘Developing’ the Non-Western World after 1945, forthcoming Volume 7, No. 2 (2009).

      “Recent Comparative Approaches to Imperial History and Settler Colonialism,” review in: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 34, Issue 2, (June 2008): 451-454.

      “Colonial Foresters versus Agriculturalists: The Debate over Climate and Cocoa Diseases in British West Africa, 1925-1950,” forthcoming in: Agricultural History, Vol. 83, No. 1 (2009).

      “Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism,” in: Karen Oslund, Neil Brimnes and Niklas Thode Jenson (eds), Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Environment, sponsored by the German Historical Institute (under review by Ohio University Press).

      “Science, Development and Empire: The Colonial Advisory Council on Agriculture and Animal Health, 1925-1943,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (January 2002): 1-26.