Decolonising Rural Spaces: FAO in India and British-Malaya, c. 1947-1965.

Abstract This article discusses how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shaped notions of rural life, rural community, and social reform in the context of South and Southeast Asian decolonisation. Building on scholarship analysing rural development either in term of continuities from the colonial era or as the result of specific circumstances after the Second World War, the argument here is that we can understand approaches to rural welfare after 1945 as the historical intersection of three factors: the rural specificities of decolonisation related to violence and mass displacement; FAO seeking relevance and legitimacy in the post-war order; and urban and rural elites objectifying rural life as a cornerstone of post-imperial nation-building. Empirically, the article analyses two (former) British colonies that experienced two different forms of decolonisation: territorial partition and imperial warfare. It relates these modes of decolonisation to the early formations of FAO’s rural expertise and argues that decolonisation was a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development agenda.