Christian Beliefs and African Economic Development in the 1930s

Austin’s Christianity and his interest in development came together when in the 1930s he took part in two major studies of African problems, the first of which required him to visit what is now Zambia. The Archbishop of York asked A.C. Pigou in 1932 to suggest someone to join a commission of enquiry under the auspices of the International Missionary Council, to spend six months in Africa analysing the impact of copper mining on indigenous society. Cairncross (1993: 51) says Austin’s chapters in Modern Industry and the African, Davis (1933), ‘constitute one of the first attempts by an economist to arrive at a view of what makes for successful economic development in a backward country’. There, Austin used the new ideas that were emerging in Cambridge as Keynes moved from A Treatise on Money (Keynes 1930 [1973]) to The General Theory (Keynes 1936 [1973]), spurred on by the criticisms and suggestions of the Circus, of which Austin was a key member.^[1] They gave him the rudiments of a national accounting framework in which to think about structures and imbalances as between rural and urban sectors, overseas trade and development, and the impact of government expenditure and taxation on economic systems.

Austin was also always interested in individuals as such (and their groupings); so, as he thought about rural underemployment and poverty, he was keen to use the potential skills and aspirations of people where they were, rather than advocate large migrations or the creation of huge urban concentrations. In his letters, he wrote much about the characteristics of the Africans with whom he came into contact, using as his numeraire the various groupings of Indians he had known and/or observed in the 1920s. He wrote reflecting first impressions: ‘In India where servants are perfect we say “This is evidently a servile race. They can’t rule themselves”. In South Africa we say “These people can’t even lay a table. How can they run a country?”’ (Austin Robinson quoted in Cairncross ibid.: 55). For Austin, economic development had to build on the characteristics of the people as they were, or would become, and he was what we now call a ‘horses for courses’ person. He was always suspicious of allpurpose general theories and their accompanying models which were thought to be applicable regardless of time or place. He said of the Cambridge developments of the years associated with Keynes and his colleagues:

It was.. .a great step forward in economic thought when Keynes insisted that we should have...a theory that was valid not only with full (or near-full) employment, but also with unemployment—and that we should know quite clearly which of the propositions of economics were universally valid, and which were valid only in conditions in which it might be true that an increase of one activity was possible only at the expense of another activity (Austin Robinson 1947: 44; italics in original).

His other work on Africa in the 1930s did not require him to go there but it was nevertheless a major contribution, two long chapters, 157 pages in all, in Lord Hailey’s An African Survey (1938). Austin spent the vacations of the three years 1934-1937 working in Chatham House on the chapters. The Survey itself was set up in response to an appeal by General Smuts in 1929— he called for a survey of Africa’s affairs as a whole, reviewing developments in each country and to what extent they were affected by and gained from modern knowledge. Austin drew on the work of S.F. Frankel on capital investment in Africa and Charlotte Leubuscher on African foreign trade for the external aspects (Chapter 19), and on Hailey’s own ‘immensely conscientious’ notes for the internal aspects (Chapter 20). The quality of Austin’s chapters was such as to give the ‘chapters a place amongst the classics of economic literature’ (Hall quoted in Cairncross ibid.: 73).

• [1] The Circus was a group of young economists—Austin and Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn,and James Meade—who met to discuss A Treatise on Money. Their deliberations were usually reported toKeynes by Kahn who then conveyed Keynes’s reaction to the Circus members.