An Empire of Development: Africa and the Caribbean in God's Chillun

摘要

In 1938, the General Post Office Film Unit, an outgrowth of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, released God's Chillun, an experimental documentary set in the British West Indies. The film features footage shot by Basil Wright during a visit to the Caribbean in 1933, the official centennial of the British abolition of slavery, and it was released amid significant labour and political unrest in the Caribbean. This essay examines God's Chillun within the context of imperial propaganda efforts and more far-reaching debates about the legacy of slavery and the nature of Britain's relationship to its West Indian and African colonies during the 1930s. Sparked to a large extent by the unrest in the Caribbean, the decade saw a major re-conceptualization of empire around the notion of colonial development. The turn towards development also contributed to a growing tendency among both critics and agents of empire to link the disparate colonies of Britain's ‘tropical empire’ in the Caribbean and Africa within a single imaginative and analytic frame. God's Chillun appeared at a moment when ‘partnership’ emerged as a term intended to signal the turn away from ‘trusteeship’ and to capture the need for direct government investment in development, the systemization of colonial administration, and a limited expansion of colonial participation in the latter. As such, the film, at once, reflects and exposes some of the contradictions of this re-imagining of the British Empire as it developed in the late 1930s and 1940s.