THREE UNIVERSITIES AND THE BRITISH ELITE: A SCIENCE OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE UK
| Published date | 01 June 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2006.00005.x |
| Date | 01 June 2006 |
| Author | VÉRONIQUE DIMIER |
Public Administration Vol. 84, No. 2, 2006 (337–366)
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
THREE UNIVERSITIES AND THE BRITISH
ELITE: A SCIENCE OF COLONIAL
ADMINISTRATION IN THE UK
VÉRONIQUE DIMIER
In this article we examine how the science of colonial administration, which evolved
within the training for colonial administrators in the decades 1930 – 50 in Britain,
became institutionalized in British Universities. We will see that both the colonial
context and the somewhat ambivalent conception of colonial administration con-
veyed by academics such as Margery Perham, Lucy Mair and offi cials from the
Colonial Offi ce may have justifi ed the need to consider colonial administration to be
a scientifi c discipline in its own right, but that it was perhaps the fi ght between the
universities to control and produce the British administrative elite which provided
the driver that helped that science to gain institutional legitimacy.
Training top civil servants has been a subject of recurrent debate in the UK
from the early days of the unifi cation and rationalization of the Home Civil
Service in the 1850s to its more recent evolution (through the Next Steps
programme), considered by some as the downfall of the British administra-
tive tradition ( Chapman 1992 ). Debates on whether public administration –
or more recently public management – as an academic study should be part
of that training have also occurred regularly. According to some analysts
(see Barker 1944, p. 31), Britain has always considered government to be an
art, reserved for ‘ gentlemen ’ or ‘ all rounders ’ , while France, for example, has
considered it to be a science. This would explain why in France a specifi c
training was devised to equip future top civil servants with the kind of
knowledge they supposedly needed, especially courses in public administra-
tion. In the UK, on the other hand, such training programmes came into
being in the 1960s and have always been regarded with suspicion by a part
of the British elite: good government, it was said, can only be learnt on the
job through ‘ trial and error ’ . Personal qualities are of greater importance
than theoretical knowledge in public administration.
This British outlook is usually explained either in terms of the ‘ national
culture ’ or as an expression of the ‘ British character ’ . This explanation tends
to overlook the fact that from the 1920s onwards, the idea of offering training
courses in public administration that were devised specifi cally for British
top civil servants was put forward by bodies such as the Royal Institute of
Public Administration (no longer extant) and in the journal Public
Administration (the antecedent of the present Journal), created in 1922. It also
Véronique Dimier in the Institute of European Studies, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
338 VÉRONIQUE DIMIER
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006 Public Administration Vol. 84, No. 2, 2006 (337–366)
neglects one of the only fi elds where a specifi c training for top civil servants,
which included courses in administration, was set up as early as the 1920s:
the British Colonial Service.
Although an exception to the general rule, it serves to make us sceptical
of the validity of the culturalist analysis. This tends to make culture, as a
superior entity, the sole explanation and only determinant of social action.
This is not to say that administrative culture does not have an effect on the
way civil servants are trained but that other factors have to be taken into
account in order to explain the existence as well as the content of such train-
ing. In that regard, our approach here will be different. We will focus on the
factors that led to the institutionalization of a science of colonial administra-
tion within the training for colonial administrators in Tropical Africa from
the 1920s onwards. We will cover the training for colonial administrators as
well as specifi c courses in colonial administration. Following the Weberian
approach, our analysis will integrate actors ’ representations, interests and
strategies as well as their interactions as the basis for action. It will also seek
to integrate the context in which they operated.
Our actors will be of two kinds. The fi rst are individuals, more precisely
two leading personalities, who took an active part in the defi nition and in-
stitutionalization of a science of colonial administration: Margery Perham,
Research Lecturer and subsequently Reader in Colonial Administration at
the University of Oxford (1939 – 48) and Director of the Institute of Colonial
Administration (1943 – 47), and Lucy Mair, Lecturer in Colonial Administration
at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 1932. If
other offi cials and academics were involved in reforming the training given
to colonial administrators and in setting up research in social sciences as
linked to colonial government, these two academics were the fi rst to clearly
defi ne colonial government and administration as a subject of study in itself,
and the only ones who held academic positions in that specifi c fi eld up until
the end of the 1940s. The second type of actor will be institutional; that is to
say, precisely those institutions in which the training of colonial adminis-
trators and the institutionalization of a science of colonial administration
took place through the creation of specifi c academic positions at Cambridge,
Oxford and London Universities.
This training was part of the rationalization and unifi cation of the colonial
administrative services. Until 1932, colonial administrators in Tropical Africa
belonged to separate services, each having its own status. In 1932, a unifi ed
service, the colonial administrative service, was created. This service in-
cluded top offi cers going to Tropical Africa for most of them (excluding the
Sudan) and also a minority of offi cers going to Asia (excluding India). This
unifi ed status meant both unifi ed recruitment (in the hands of Ralph Furse,
who, in the colonial offi ce, had overall responsibility for recruiting colonial
administrators during the interwar period) as well as a common training
course organized by the Colonial Offi ce. This training was offered to those
appointed to positions of Assistant District Offi cer or Assistant District
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