The ideas and practices of development have been subject to much scholarly attention and an increasingly detailed picture has emerged of development interventions in the past. Informed by the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and others, development is often described as a regime - an all encompassing form of state power which is intrusive, transformative, disruptive, simplifying, hubristic and often ultimately futile. The role of experts (as they are almost always known in this literature) is often said to have been to legimitise these state interventions. For scholars the exemplar of the development project of the twentieth century is the large-scale African agricultural scheme. The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about our understanding of the development projects of the past. The first concerns the focus on agricultural projects that occurred in rural Africa. There has been a real concentration of scholarly attention on this particular type of development project and arguably it is the characteristics of these type of projects that have come to define the nature of development in the existing literature. However, Havinden and Meredith show British funding for development between 1945 and 1970 privileged social projects, such as education and water schemes, followed by communications projects such as road building. But where are our historical accounts of road and school building, of new airports and harbours, of water and sanitation projects in the British colonies? To what extent is it valid to take agricultural schemes as representative of a development ethos of the mid-twentieth century, since they were one category of project amongst many at this point? Additionally, why is it so often Africa that is the focus of attention? This paper will show how a study of development plans for the Caribbean region reveals some important and overlooked features of development after 1940. Development was a more diverse set of ideas and practices then some accounts led us to believe for reasons which will be explored here. Finally, this paper will argue that the term ‘expert’ is unhelpful in creating sophisticated literature on science and development since the twentieth century saw increasing diversity in technical personnel in the tropics, in terms of educational achievement, specialty and function.