Triumph of the Expert is an illuminating study of the history of development, with two primary analytical commitments. First, Hodge is intent on challenging accounts that date development to the post–World War II era. He instead argues that development has its roots in the colonial period. Second, Hodge contests conventional depictions of development as a monolithic and totalizing knowledge-power regime imposed from above. Rather, he contends that a variety of development ideas and practices were produced and institutionalized through exchanges and struggles for power among metropolitan and colonial politicians, administrators, scientists, and technical advisors.

The broad outlines of these positions build upon current trends in the historiography and are not especially novel. But Hodge's real contribution comes in the way that he supports these arguments and the particular substance he lends them. By ambitiously framing his study across the colonial/postcolonial divide and in terms of the entire British Empire, Hodge illuminates facets of the history of development that are otherwise obscured. Specifically, Hodge brings to light the role that Britain's imperial networks of applied scientific and technical experts played in shaping development throughout the twentieth century. Hodge argues that it was the “triumph” of such experts in Britain's struggles over how to manage the crises of the late colonial period—namely, the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the strikes, riots, political movements, and ecological crises that followed during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—that inaugurated the modern framework of development with its emphases on agrarian concerns, technical solutions, and state intervention.

Hodge builds his case in seven meticulously researched and richly detailed chapters that cover from the late 1800s through the 1960s. He begins by documenting the Colonial Office's early patronage of applied agricultural and medical experts to help expand the imperial production and extraction of tropical commodities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1930s and ’40s, however, economic, political, and ecological turmoil throughout the empire had led Colonial Office experts to question long-standing assumptions of resource abundance and labor scarcity. Field data and reports instead supported perceptions of acute poverty, population surplus, rural emigration, and deteriorating environments. In experts’ eyes, the imposition of capitalist production and markets on traditional rural village communities had unleashed destructive processes that were undoing the fabric of sustainable agrarian life.

Concerned about threats to British rule and profits, during the late ’30s and ’40s the Colonial Office increasingly relied on its growing body of applied scientific experts rather than its district administrators and began to rework earlier development models in accordance with these experts’ data and crisis theories. The outcome was a revised development framework characterized by a “human side”—one that called for expansive state-directed initiatives aimed at the comprehensive reconstruction of “rural communities” and the sustainable management of agrarian overpopulation, landlessness, soil erosion and infertility, malnutrition, and unsanitary disease conditions. Agrarian poverty was conceived as a technical problem of governance that required state intervention with cutting-edge agricultural, medical, and educational technologies to ensure future social stability and political control for Britain's long-term benefit.

Although only considered in the book's conclusion, the most salient point in Hodge's study concerns the legacy of the experts’ “triumph.” British-applied scientific experts attained an unprecedented level of authority within the Colonial Office by the 1950s. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, these experts remained in control of Britain's development policy making despite “indigenous” noncompliance and resistance, substantial opposition to their schemes from colonial administrative officers, and numerous disastrous outcomes. As Britain's colonies won their political independence, many of the Colonial Office's technical experts also went on to find employment as scientific advisors and development officers for international aid institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. Agency for International Development, United Nations Development Program, World Health Organization, and the World Bank. These institutions aimed to ensure that the newly independent nations of the third world aligned themselves with the West in the cold war and continued to provide cheap raw materials for Western industrial economies. In this context, British experts’ faith in technical solutions and external state intervention to ensure prosperous rural communities continued to animate policy making.

Hodge skillfully illuminates the role played by, and core assumptions of, applied scientific experts through to the present day. Yet he also reproduces aspects of the experts’ thinking as his own. For instance, Hodge follows Colonial Office experts in assuming that the British Empire constituted a single colonial context composed of “local” places. The vast majority of his archival evidence derives from Colonial Office records pertaining to sub-Saharan Africa, on the basis of which Hodge generalizes to the rest of the empire. However, historians of the Caribbean and Southern Asia are likely to be uneasy with aspects of Hodge's chronology and conclusions, seeing evidence of the role of applied scientists and a “modern” development agenda farther back in time.

Hodge also adopts applied scientists’ view that the state sits atop and manages society below it and that “indigenous people” were simply passive or resisting targets of external state initiatives. The only “locals” who exercise inventive agency in shaping development ideas and practices are British officials and advisers in the colonies, not Africans. Africans employed in the colonial technical services are ignored, and African struggles, strikes, riots, and political movements provide little more than a contextual backdrop of “local indigenous reaction” (181) against which British actors must creatively respond and act. Aside from a very brief discussion of Ghana's Nkrumah, Hodge also leaves the efforts that political leaders and citizens in newly independent nations made to reframe and rework the agrarian and other biases of colonial development unexplored. Consequently, his study is best read as a complement to regionally grounded histories.

The extent to which applied scientists’ role in shaping development in Africa and elsewhere was particular to British colonialism is also left wide open to question. Yet Hodge's analysis of the “triumph of the expert” is undoubtedly a pathbreaking historical study with important implications for understanding the current nature of international development. As such, it deserves to be widely read by scholars and practitioners and used for teaching purposes.