Spatial practices & Imaginaries: Experiences of colonial officers & development professionals

Abstract

Introduction This chapter explores the spatiality of colonial and postcolonial power and discourse as produced, performed and imagined by former united kingdom colonial service officers and contemporary international development ‘professionals’. It demonstrates temporal continuities and discontinuities in spatially extended practices and suggests that decolonisation, while a significant historical process, led to a reconfiguration of people, ideas and spaces rather than a wholesale epochal transformation. Accordingly, the trajectory from colonialism to development is more usefully characterised as a shift in emphasis (Crush 1995), rather than of one bounded historical moment to another. I hi..