Abstract
On the eve of the Second World War — as it turned out, in itself an event destined to become an imperial turning-point of unforeseeable magnitude — the British Empire comprised almost twelve million square miles. That was over a quarter of the world’s inhabited land mass, eighty times the size of Great Britain. Modestly, the Colonial Office, with authority over thirty-five countries, took care to point out that this impressive statistic did not include those territories which Britain or one or other of its Dominions was administering on behalf of the League of Nations.1 More modestly still, the Colonial Office maintained a category of Miscellaneous Islands. ‘Various islands and rocks throughout the world are British territory’, ran the definition, but, it was conceded, ‘many of these have no permanent inhabitants’.2 Nor, of course, did it include the million or so square miles and 9m inhabitants of the joint condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Some of these possessions were islands with sizeable offshore jurisdiction, and the substantial Tanganyika Territory had 20 000 of its 360 000 square miles classified as water. The post-First World War acquisitions of League of Nations mandates added a further 10 per cent to the Colonial Empire. To put this into some sort of ready-to-recognize imperial perspective, 7.5 m square miles comprised the four self-governing Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, while India accounted for another 1.8 m square miles, so the Colonial Empire, in so far as the direct responsibility of the British government exercised through the Colonial and not any of the separate Dominions, India or Foreign Offices was at issue, amounted to nearly 2 m square miles, carrying a population of approximately 50 million. Add to this the 35 million living in the Dominions and the 400 million in India, and the Empire could claim a quarter of the world’s population. In comparison, the Roman Empire held jurisdiction over 120 m people in an area of 2.5 m square miles.
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Notes
Leonard Barnes, ‘The Colonial Service’, in The British Civil Servant, ed. William A. Robson, 1937, 232.
D. M. Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1961, 276.
Cf. S. E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885, 1942, pt II, ch. VI, ‘The Third Basis’
Stig Forster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Ronald Robinson, eds, Bismarck, Europe and Africa: the Berlin African Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition, 1988, ch.14.
See Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization, 1994
J. Macqueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 1998.
Latter-day writers, fascinated by the geographical relics of the British Empire, have used such titles as Simon Winchester’s Outposts, 1985
George Drawer’s ‘A Fistful of Islands’ in his Britain’s Dependent Territories, 1992.
Cf. G. V. Fiddes, The Dominions and Colonial Offices, 1926, ch. II
H. L. Hall, The Colonial Office, 1937, ch. I
C. Jeffries, The Colonial Office, 1956, ch. I.
B. L. Blakeley, The Colonial Office, 1868–1892, 1972, vii.
See J. Garner, The Commonwealth Office, 1925–1968, 1978, ch.I.
E. Blunt maintains that the use of the term ‘civil servants’ by the Company’s non-combatant employees reaches back to at least 1765 — The I.C.S., 1937, 1.
See Donovan Williams, The India Office, 1858–1869, 1983
M. Seton, The India Office, 1926.
A. P. Kaminsky, The India Office, 1880–1910, 1986, 3.
Godley published his memoirs as Lord Kilbracken, Reminiscences, 1922.
Such was the judgement of Lord George Hamilton, Secretary of State, 1895–1903: see his Parliamentary Reminiscences and Reflections, 1886–1906, 1922, II, 261. A list of all the members of the Council of India from 1858 onwards appeared in the annual India Office List. This paragraph draws on Kaminsky, ch.II.
Cf. E. Bell, The Great Parliamentary Bore [India], 1869.
For an early study, see A.T. Carey, Colonial Students, 1956, which also examines colonial students’ own unions. The British Council published an annual report on the welfare of colonial students from 1951.
L. S. S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service, 1601–1930, 1931
E. Blunt, The I.C.S., 1937.
P. Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India, 1953–4. His real name was Mason, which appears on the subsequent reprintings.
Mason, The Guardians, 1954, 271–2.
The opinion is that of Sir Henry Taylor, Autobiography, 1800–1875, I, 1885, 232.
H. L. Hall, The Colonial Office, 1937. His biography by C. Stephen appeared in 1906.
Based on the lead character in C. Buller, Mr. Mother Country of the Colonial Office, 1840.
Cabinet memorandum of 15 Dec. 1954, CAB 129/72, C(54)393. See also the memorandum of 21 June 1954 by the Minister of Works in CAB 129/69, C(54)203. There is a photograph of the No.14 Downing Street building in Hall, Colonial Office, and life in the CO in Downing Street is well described by Sir Cosmo Parkinson, The Colonial Office from Within, 1947, ch.2, and, for an earlier period, in Young, Colonial Office, ch. 4.
The principal text remains A. W. Abbott, A Short History of the Crown Agents and their Office, 1959, for private circulation. Abbott was Chief Clerk (1948) and then Secretary of the Crown Agents (1954–8). A DPhil. thesis has been written by D. Sunderland of Wolfson College, Oxford.
Sir Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, 1922, 617.
Cf. D. J. Morgan, The Official History of Colonial Development, 1980 (five vols).
Cf. table in Young, Colonial Office, 282, for business transacted in 1806, and Fiddes, Dominions and Colonial Offices, 15, for totals in 1885, 1905, 1915 and 1924.
The documents reproduced in R. Hyam, The Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951, 1992 (4 vols), indicate that the Indian precedent was kept in mind in Cabinet and had implications for Malaya. It was the Sudan which was more in the CO mind and that of colonial governors — cf. vol. I, xxvii.
R. B. Pugh, ‘The Colonial Office, 1801–1925’, in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 3, 1959, 717. As an amusing example, including the Secretary of State’s closing minute of the operation of patronage in the earlier period, see the 1824 offer of an appointment in the CO reproduced from CO 324 in Young, Colonial Office, Appendix VII.
R. C. Snelling and I. J. Barron, ‘The Colonial Office and its Permanent Officials, 1801–1914’ in Gillian Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, 1972, ch. 6; Blakeney, Colonial Office, 87ff.
The subtitle of Ridgway F. Shinn’s biography (1990) is revealing: ‘The Chief Ornament of Scottish Learning’.
Cohen, with a double First from Cambridge, was assigned to the Inland Revenue in 1932, and spent the whole of his first year struggling to escape and secure a transfer to the Colonial Office — Ronald E. Robinson, ‘Sir Andrew Cohen’, in L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, African Proconsuls, 1978, 354.
W. Baillie Hamilton, ‘Forty-four years at the Colonial Office’, Nineteenth Century, lv, April 1909, 601.
A. Creech Jones, ‘The Colonial Service’, in W. A. Robson, ed., The Civil Service in Britain and France, 1956, 89.
Cf. Clyde Sanger, Malcolm MacDonald: Bringing an End to Empire, 1995, ch. 15.
J. Garner, The Commonwealth Office, 1925–1968, 1978, 27.
Quoted ibid., 91. See also M. Olivier, Letters and Selected Letters with a Memoir, 1948
Francis Lee’s biography of Olivier, Fabianism and Colonialism, 1988
L. Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists, 1984.
Margery Pehram, Lugard: the Years of Authority, 1960, ch. 30.
See C. Jeffries, Whitehall and the Colonial Service, 1972.
Ruth Dudley Edwards, True Brits: Inside the Foreign Office, 1994, 250.
See his memoir, C. H. Johnston, The View from Steamer Point, 1964.
Cf. Raymond A. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914, 1983, 203.
A. Adu Boahen, Britain, the Sahara and the Western Sudan, 1964, ch. VII and Appendix II.
For a discussion of the Condominium Agreement, see M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1848–1934, 1986, 11ff.
Sir Alec Stirling, HM Ambassador to the Sudan Republic 1984–86, in his Foreword to K. D. D. Henderson, Set in Authority, 1987.
Fortunately, Lord Vansittart had conveyed the ultimate admiration of the FO for the SPS in his foreword to H. C. Jackson, Sudan Days and Ways, 1954, vii.
Sir James Robertson, Transition in Africa, 1914, 96.
Quoted in Daly, Imperial Sudan, 1991, 353.
Cf. Graham F. Thomas, Last of the Proconsuls: Letters of Sir James Robertson, 1994, xiv.
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1848, chs 3 and 4.
Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service, 1938, 5.
Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: the Making of the British Colonial Service, 1963, 6.
Cf. Henry Keown-Boyd, Soldiers of the Nile: a Biographical History of the British Officers of the Egyptian Army, 1887–1925, 1996.
‘I don’t think there was ever any formal official sanction; it was simply adopted and accepted’ — Sir Harold MacMichael, Sudan Political Service, 1899–1956, n.d. 3.
G. W. Bell, Shadows on the Sand, 1983, 217.
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© 2000 Anthony Kirk-Greene
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Kirk-Greene, A. (2000). An Empire to be Administered: the Metropolitan Organization. In: Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966. St. Antony’s series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286320_3
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