Making the Village Fit for the Future: Rural Development in Twentieth-Century Asia

This journal issue re-evaluates rural reform in twentieth-century Asia. So far, historians have
approached development outside the cities as a contingent dimension of empires and nationstates
or as a derivative of urban planning efforts. By contrast, the case studies assembled here
frame the history of villages and rural change as a decisive arena in which ideas and practices
concerning the redesign of state and society were formulated, negotiated, and experimented
with. Particularly during transitional years of accelerated historical change, such as after the
world wars and during decolonization, the concept of the rural and rural communities functioned
as a medium for diverse and often conflictive notions of the future, imaginations of
socioeconomic order, and political aspirations.
The authors of these development paths were not only international development experts or
urban elites but also (self-proclaimed) representatives among rural communities who wove their
vested interests, ideas, and norms into the fabric of development and modernization. In that
light, this journal issue proposes to investigate more in detail to which extent, for whom, and
with what consequences negotiations about the meaning of the rural gave shape to developmental
ideas more generally. In other words, the case studies analyse rural history and the conceptual
history of the rural in Asia as key elements of twentieth-century development history.

This article focuses on gendered rural development work in late colonial and early post-colonial
India. Next to the question of livelihood generation and education, the issue of health and
hence of women’s vulnerability, was taken up by members of the All-India Women’s Conference
(AIWC). From the 1930s the AIWC had been interested in maternity and child welfare work. It
lobbied for adequate medical aid to women and birth control. With independence looming,
the organization turned its attention increasingly to the Indian villages. In 1946, the AIWC initiated
a mobile van scheme, called Skippo, to provide primary healthcare facilities to remote rural
areas. The article investigates the healthcare related work of the AIWC for rural communities,
focusing on the formation and development of the Skippo van scheme, the ideas behind it
and its successes and failures. By asking what motivated Indian women activists to work for
the health of their fellow countrypeople in the villages, the article strives to understand how
women scripted themselves into the narratives of national progress and development. Women
activists of the AIWC established various entanglements with international actors and organizations in pursuance of rural development work. Examining these transnational networks of
cooperation the article gives further insights in their nature, content, and outcome. It clearly
demonstrates the beneficial influence of transnational nongovernmental networks for primary
healthcare in post-colonial rural India, while also showing how Indian activists tied in the politics
of international rural development.

A debate in the early 1940s between two social scientists, Yang Kaidao and Zhou Xianwen, reinvigorated
a national conversation about China’s relationship with agriculture. Clearly China’s
roots were agrarian, but was it destined to remain “a country founded on agriculture” with the
rural village as the focal point of the state and the nucleus of society, or must the republic
industrialize in order to survive? If the answer seems obvious to the present-day observer, it
remained debatable on the eve of the communist revolution. This paper uses the Yang-Zhou
debate as a window on past visions of an agrarian future that were impassioned yet full of irony:
agricultural fundamentalists pointed to settled agriculture as a distinctive and transhistorical
feature of the Chinese state, but their arguments and policy recommendations echoed similar
movements in Japan, Italy, Latvia, and many other twentieth-century states. We contend that
China’s twentieth-century agrarian fundamentalism should be acknowledged both as a pivotal
yet underexplored cornerstone of Chinese nationalism and as a key link in a broader global
agrarian-nationalist movement that largely dissipated after the Second World War.

After the loss of its colonies, Germany had to find new strategies to connect with the world.
This article examines the continuities and differences after the two world wars when the Weimar
Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany tried to re-establish their contacts with the
non-European world through development aid for the agricultural sector. Following German
agricultural ‘experts’ from the (semi-)colonial period to the independence of Siam/Thailand and
the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, this paper asks how these different German states combined
agricultural modernisation and development aid over time. It argues that personal connections
originating from the interwar period are more important to understand the steering of German
development aid in the 1950s than the Cold War, which has dominated much of the historical
literature to date. A closer look also reveals that West German development aid was surprisingly
flexible and non-ideological. This is all the more surprising against the background of the European
and international context that influenced West Germany’s relations with Southeast Asia,
as West Germany was caught up in the systemic competition of the Cold War confrontation, especially
through the existence of the second German state, the German Democratic Republic.

Using Lévi-Strauss’s dichotomy of hot and cold societies, this article examines culture- and epoch-
specific perceptions of change in conjunction with attitudes toward pasts. It argues that a
transformation of the cold perception, seeking to keep change at bay, into the hot perception,
focused on promoting change, took place in Europe at c. 1800. This transformation concurred
with the strengthening experience of a gap disjoining past from present and of the felt need
to conjoin past with present through historiography. In other parts of the planet, however, the
cold perception of change prevailed jointly with the experience of continuity from past into
future. The discrepancy between these perceptions of change and attitudes toward pasts has
ushered in conflicts during and after colonial rule and has suspended or even suppressed endogenous
potentials for change in groups subject to colonial rule.