A Charter for the Colonies: The Colonies at the Philadelphia Conference, 1944

Abstract

In 1943 it became increasingly clear that the time to re-plot the coordinates of colonial social policy was drawing closer. Encouragement and inspiration for the authors of new policy came from many sources. In addition, as post-war planning by the Allies progressed, the ILO was forced to confront some existential questions. The Office recognized the increasing need to get actively involved in international planning and thus to relinquish, to some extent, its traditionally cautious approach. A new world was being created and the ILO would have to move into areas that had previously been out of its reach if it was to make a place for itself. Wilfrid Benson was given the task of drawing up one of the documents described by the British historian Mark Mazower as “blueprints for the golden age”,¹ the outlines upon which a just post-war order would be based.² Benson’s plan for a “people’s peace in the colonies” was a document which, in its universalistic language and calls for active development, represented an almost total break with the Organization’s “native labour” work in the period before the war. Its adoption at the Philadelphia Conference, where the ILO proclaimed the idea of universal social rights and convincingly claimed for itself a role in structuring the post-war order, was a milestone in the treatment of colonial social policy on an international level.