The Empire Meets the New Deal

Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning

Bibliographic Data

ID5877170
AuthorsJ M Powell (0000-0001-8029-4245, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume43
Issue4
Pages337-360
Publication date2005-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1745-5863 • E-ISSN: 1745-5871
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1745-5871.2005.00340.x
OpenAlexW2130962525
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited58

British imperial and American experiences in conservation and planning are providing fresh interdisciplinary challenges for university teaching and research. The Roosevelt administration's 'New Deal' included government-sponsored interventions in soil erosion and water management and sophisticated regional development agendas. Reviewing samples of the latter areas of concern, this article explores the proposition that, although the British Empire was scarcely bereft of comparable interwar programmes and was becoming somewhat preoccupied with centrifugal tendencies, persistent porosity, exhausting struggles with postwar reconstruction, and comprehensive economic depression, New Deal evangelism was in fact variously anticipated, harnessed, challenged and ignored.A discussion of widely separated national and regional examples locates a layered interplay between uneven imperial and US pulsations, independent local manoeuvres, and critical inputs from key individual agents. The most important filters included the presence of comparatively robust bureaucratic infrastructures and the cultivation of international relationships by scientists and technologists. Encounters with convergent revisionism suggest cautionary leads for students, researchers and teachers alike. Reconstructions of selected contexts underline the presence of familiar posturing, opportunism, and astute patriotic deployment during the emergence of modern styles of globalization

British Empire · Bureaucracy · Empire · New Deal · Opportunism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration