The Tanzanian Economy 1920-1985

Book excerpt: This book describes the fate typical of most African states in the twentieth century. Efforts under colonial rule after 1945 focused on enlarged surplus extraction during that interwar period. European colonial powers lacked administrative resources, hence the economic failure of modernization, the editor asserts. The war experience contributed to the African peoples' resistance to an alien political system that neither delivered the economic goods nor provided social self-esteem in Tanzania.