Taking the Indian sub-continent as an example, Wood itemizes the extent
of colonial state intervention designed to ensure the right conditions for the
exploitation of labour in order to raise the level of the surplus value which it
creates:
tenancy legislation, revenue and rent fixing, head/poll taxes, monetiza-
tions of those obligations, registration of families, restrictions on their
mobility, control of migrant workers and disposal of their incomes,
expropriation of land to create homelands for expatriate settlement and
plantations. (Wood, G. D., 1984b, p. 35)
Consequently political and economic relationships became fused, leaving
‘little room for the legitimating support of bourgeois ideology’. This failure
to convert labour into a commodity whose status is sustained by ‘bourgeois
freedoms’ had profound effects on political development. The absence of
laws and practices supporting the development of a labour force free to enter
into wage contracts with employers removed an essential prerequisite of the
liberal democratic state. Colonialism in its political and economic form was
not consistent with the model of the bourgeois state. The role of the colonial
state was inconsistent with the values and practices of liberalism.
Colonialism could not provide an ideology to sustain liberal democracy. This
may be colonialism’s most important legacy for post-colonial societies.
Two further legacies of the colonial experience can be identified. From a
comparative study of African colonies Berman concludes first that colonial-
ism established the state as the source of economic development and there-
fore as the focus of a particular kind of political conflict. The process began
when colonial administrators encouraged selective indigenous élites to par-
ticipate in production and trade through institutions such as co-operatives
which had been established by the colonial authorities. ‘All of this meant that
the administrators mediated access to many of the sources of accumulation
and the state increasingly became the necessary focus of the emerging proto-
capitalist class’ (Berman, 1984, p. 186; see also Lonsdale, 1981, pp. 193–4).
This trend was encouraged by post-war colonial development policies
involving state-sponsored rural development programmes, commodity mar-
keting boards, wage and labour laws, and public expenditure on the social
and economic infrastructure. Consequently political power became much
more than a matter of national sovereignty for the emerging nationalist élites.
Secondly, Berman notes that the colonial administrations fragmented
African society through an informal policy of ‘divide and rule’. This
obstructed the development of alignments on a national scale by encouraging
identification with ethnicity and locality. It was in the interest of colonial
42 Understanding Third World Politics