Empowering the Imperial Administrator

Abstract

This book has offered a socio-institutional history of the composition and work of Britain’s three principal corps of overseas administrators during the century c. 1860 to c. 1960. This was the era which saw Britain’s ad hoc appointments of imperial administrators cohere into elite cadres of professionals and the Service convert into a major career option for hundreds of British graduates in search of Crown service overseas. The same century witnessed the decline and termination of such a career, from the security of its peak of authority through the constitutional enabling of its demission of power and on to the final dissolution of the respective civil services. The focus has not been on the minutiae of imperial policy but on imperial administrators, encapsulated in the person of the generic District Officer. The DO at once represents a concept, a figure and a status instantly recognizable both in situ and in the literature, regardless of whether he was locally identified as the Collector of the Indian Civil Service, the Government Agent of Ceylon, the District Commissioner of the Sudan, East and Central Africa and the Pacific, the District Officer of South East Asia and West Africa, the Travelling Commissioner of the West Coast, or the Resident Magistrate of the High Commission Territories.