Anthony H. M. Kirk-Greene

The History of Nigeria

Introduction 1. Early states and societies, 9,000 BCE-1500 CE 2. Slavery, state and society, c.1500-c. 1800 3. Political and economic transformations in the nineteenth century 4. Transition to British colonial rule, 1850-1903 5. Colonial society to 1929 6. Nationalist movements and independence, 1929-60 7. Instability and civil war, 1960-70 8. Oil, state, and society, 1970-83 9. Civil society and democratic transition, 1984-2007 10. Nigeria and Nigerians in world history Concluding remarks: Corruption, anti-corruption, and the 2007 elections.

The British intellectual engagement with Africa in the twentieth century

Notes on the Contributors List of Maps Introduction D.Rimmer & A.Kirk-Greene The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the UK A.Kirk-Greene Colonial Studies D.Killingray The Engagement with Higher Education L.Bown Approaches to Decolonization J.D.Hargreaves Africa and the Study of Politics C.Clapman & R.Hodder-Williams Historians and African History M.Twaddle African Ethnographies and the Development of Social Anthropology A.F.Robertson The African Environment, Understood and Misunderstood A.T.Grove The Literary Engagement A.Niven African Development in Economic Thought D.Rimmer Index

Public administration and the colonial administrator

By title, function and history, the colonial administrator was prima facie an early example of the professional administrator. Yet how far public administration was an integral element in his training and performance is questionable. By the decolonizing 1950s, public administration was still not a conspicuous feature in the administrative vocabulary. Even when the latter-day colonial administrator was subjected to the educating influence of the Journal of African Administration, neither he nor the Journal widely resorted to the use of public administration pur sang. Yet administrative training was the keyword for both. This article directs attention to the way in which colonial administrators were selected and how they were trained. Three critical, post-1950, influences on the latter-day colonial administrator are examined: the impact of the Journal of African Adminstration; the role and staffing of Africas new Institutes of Administration; and the colonial administrators ‘second career’ in public administration in the UK. Copyright

The Sudan Political Service, 1899–1955

Of Britain’s three principal overseas civil services considered here, the Sudan Political Service — the key provincial administration — was at once the youngest and the smallest of them all. Established in 1899, forty years after the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and abolished in 1955 (indeed, no British officers were recruited after 1952), forty years before the one-time Colonial Service (later HMOCS) approached the end of its time in Hong Kong, and never numbering more than 150 on duty in any one year and with less than 500 members in the whole of its existence,1 the Sudan Political Service (SPS) was characterized by a certain sui generis character in the history of Britain’s overseas civil services.

On Crown Service: A History of H. M. Colonial and Overseas Civil Services, 1837-1997

An expanding empire to staff, 1837-1899 the evolution of the modern Colonial Service, 1900-1939 the expansion of the post-war Colonial Service, 1943-1954 HMOCS - reshaping a successor service, 1954-1997 envoi.

Empowering the Imperial Administrator

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.

The Transfer of Power and Localization

The first decade following the transfer of power to successive new nations from within the colonial empire was characterized by a glow of mutual congratulations on one feature above all in the imperial governmental legacy. This was the inheritance of a sound civil service derived from many years of the finest British traditions of efficiency, dedication, loyalty to whatever elected government was in power, and total incorruptibility. That at least was the image, promoted and generally perceived. The fact that different circumstances and needs had meant that Britain’s successor civil services were not necessarily the same thing as the metropolitan Home Civil Service, in responsibilities as well as recruitment, was beside the point. The message, a two-way donor-receiver one, was clear and for the most part genuine: in the legacy of the British connection, ‘we’ gave ‘you’ the democratic model of a civil service second to none. In return the other ‘we’ are grateful to the other ‘you’ for such a priceless bequest. Parliamentarianism might need a little longer to take root. In the wake of a government which was by definition ‘imperial’, democracy might need a little longer yet. But the rule of law and its instrument of an upright, impartial and trained civil service were already in operation, ready loyally to serve the new government. Localization of the bureaucracy was as transparent a symbol of the transfer of power as was the new national flag.

The Colonial Administrative Service, 1895–1966

The Colonial Service is not only the longest-lived of Britain’s three pre-eminent overseas civil services under examination here, it is also by far the largest. On the other hand, while there is no room for argument over the exact dates of the life of the ICS, 1858–1947 (allowing for historians of bureaucracy to trace the pre-Crown continuities in administrative structure and system from the East India Company’s Civil Service), and a largely academic question mark of no more than a matter of months hangs over the exact calendar of the Sudan Political Service, 1899–1955, both the beginning and the end of the Colonial Service are shrouded in indeterminacy.

On Company and Other Crown Service Overseas

Part II examines the recruitment, composition, structure and work of the Administrative (in some instances and at some periods called Political) branches of Britain’s three principal overseas civil services: in the Indian Empire, in the Colonial Empire, and in the Condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In the century covered by this study, these were the imperial civil services which regularly offered a life-time career in government administration overseas to hundreds of young Britons educated predominantly in British public schools and graduating pre-eminently from British universities. No exact figure has been put on the total of Britons who chose this kind of career abroad, but an idea of the scale can be gathered from the following statistics for the twentieth century alone. Between 1919 and 1939 almost 1700 appointments were made to the Colonial Administrative Service, with a further 1500 between 1945 and 1950 and over a hundred in each of 1953 and 1957.1 The Indian Civil Service, with 950 posts held by Europeans in 1899, was still appointing an average of 30 British probationers a year in its years of declining attraction, 1925–35, following on 500 British appointments between 1904 and 1913 and a further 130 in the reconstruction years 1919–21.2 The Sudan Political Service had a total cadre in its existence of approximately 500 posts, every one held by Britons. All this was for the Administrative Services alone, without taking into account any of the professional men and women who sought an appointment in the Empire, averaging between 1919 and 1957 a further five hundred a year into the Colonial Service alone.

An Empire to be Administered: the Metropolitan Organization

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.