Wartime Origins of Political Transfer

Abstract

After 1865, the year of an often-quoted and often-misunderstood Parliamentary Committee, the transfer of power in British West Africa was a subject to which less thought was given in Great Britain than among Africans. For supporters of empire, the question was removed from the agenda when vast new imperial commitments were undertaken during the partition. Among the critics, anti-imperialists who aimed at the destruction of colonial empire were always fewer and less effective than those who aimed to transform colonial dominance into juster (and so potentially more durable) forms of relationship. Under economic and political pressures during the inter-war years, the ideas and programmes of colonial reformers began increasingly to penetrate the “policy-making elite”. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 crowned the first phase of a major re-appraisal. But despite political rhetoric concerning gradual progress towards self-government, ambiguity persisted about the political goals towards which the new “planned colonial policy” would lead West Africa; economic and social development could equally well culminate with their closer incorporation into the Empire-Commonwealth system as in a transfer of political power. At the outbreak of the Second World War, constitutional changes in central government remained very low on the working agenda of West African administrations.