Abstract
Perhaps the most obvious rejoinder to the suggestion that the period after the Second World War can be seen as the gradual winding down of the British colonial empire is the fact that the number of individuals employed in the colonial services reached their peak in 1954, with a total of 18,000 officers (from 8,000 in 1938).1 The growth of the colonial services in the postwar period was driven by substantial expansion in specialist and professional roles including teachers, policemen, lawyers and engineers. Many of these officers had been employed to execute and manage development schemes funded through the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of the 1940s and 1950s. The first of these in 1940 marked a shift in policy by the Colonial Office in London towards a more interventionist and planned form of development for the British colonies. This reform was prompted in part by the need to restore the credibility of British imperial rule in the face of colonial unrest and international and domestic criticism of the failure of previous development initiatives by Britain. It was hoped that the full extent of British altruism would be demonstrated by replacing loans to the Colonies by free grants and emphasis was placed on the need for development projects of social value along with schemes intended to increase economic prosperity.2
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Notes
Anthony Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service: A History of HM Colonial and Overseas Service, 1837–1997 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), p. 51.
Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1984), ch. 7; David Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945–1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 11; Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 199–205; J.M. Lee and Martin Petter, The Colonial Office, War and Development Policy: Organisation and the Planning of a Metropolitan Initiative, 1939–1945 (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982); S.R. Ashton and S.E. Stockwell (eds) Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925–1945, British Documents on the End of Empire, ser. A, Vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1996); Ronald Hyam, The Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951 (London: HMSO, 1992).
Sabine Clarke, ‘A Technocratic Imperial State? The Colonial Office and Scientific Research, 1940–1960’, Twentieth Century British History 18 (2007), 453–80.
For the creation of the first medical departments in East Africa see, Ann Beck, A History of the British Medical Administration of East Africa, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970); on agriculture see G.B. Masefield, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Joseph Hodge, The Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Imperialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).
Ralph Furse, Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 134–62.
Michael Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’ (PhD, University of Sussex, 1979), p. 211.
E.B. Worthington, Science in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 318.
Hodge, The Triumph of the Expert, ch. 5, and Chapter 10 of this volume; Helen Tilley, ‘African Environments and Environmental Sciences: The African Research Survey, Ecological Paradigms and British Colonial Development, 1920–1940’, in William Beinart and Joanne McGregor (eds) Social History and African Environments (Oxford: James Currey and Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 109–30.
A.V. Hill, The Ethical Dilemma of Science (New York: The Rockefeller Institute Press, 1960), p. 50.
David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ch. 3.
Sabine Clarke, ‘Experts, Empire and Development: Fundamental Research for the British Colonies, 1940–1960’ (PhD, University of London, 2006).
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© 2011 Sabine Clarke
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Clarke, S. (2011). ‘The Chance to Send Their First Class Men Out to the Colonies’: The Making of the Colonial Research Service. In: Bennett, B.M., Hodge, J.M. (eds) Science and Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_9
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