The Colonial Civil Service

The British colonial civil service was, in its late-Victorian heyday, the largest and most carefully organised professional body in the world outside the regular military establishments. The Colonial Office List for 1900 records some 1,500 European officers of the “administrative class” in the Crown Colonies and Protectorates, supported by perhaps 12,000 subordinate officers drawn from the local populations. The Indian Civil Service, of course, was much larger: at the height of the Raj in 1939, the ICS comprised 1,300 European and Indian members. But the colonial civil service outside India, often forgotten in the metropolitan histories, was the actual instrument of British rule in West and East Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. It was, as the historian D. A. Low put it, the “steel frame” in miniature, and it had a longer life than the Indian one.

The Origins of the Colonial Civil Service

The colonial civil service emerged slowly. The older settler colonies — the North American colonies before 1776, the West Indian plantation colonies, the Cape Colony, and the Australian penal colonies — had their own civil services, often recruited by patronage or purchase, and not subject to much metropolitan supervision. The professionalisation of the colonial civil service was the work of the late nineteenth century: the Colonial Office Act of 1860, the New Oriental Policy of the 1840s, the Order in Council of 1870 (which regulated admission to the colonial service), and the establishment of the Colonial Office Cadetships in 1871.

The Colonial Office Cadetships were modelled on the Indian Civil Service open competitive examination, although the syllabus was different and the standard lower. The successful cadets were required to undergo a probationary period at an approved institution — the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, the School of Oriental and African Studies, or (in the case of the legal cadets) one of the Inns of Court — before being posted to a colony. The cadet scheme was discontinued in 1908 and replaced by a more open system of “Colonial Service” appointments, but the underlying idea — that the colonial civil service should be a unified, professional, metropolitan-recruited body — survived.

The Structure of the Colonial Civil Service

The colonial civil service was organised in three broad grades. The “administrative” grade comprised the senior officers: governors, lieutenant-governors, chief commissioners, residents, and the heads of the major departments (treasury, customs, police, education, medical, public works). The “executive” grade comprised the officers who did the actual work of government: district officers, district commissioners, provincial commissioners, treasurers, magistrates, customs officers, and the senior professional officers. The “subordinate” or “clerical” grade comprised the much larger number of locally-recruited officers: clerks, tax collectors, teachers, dispensers, and the like.

The pay of the senior administrative grade was generous, although it varied considerably from colony to colony. A senior district officer in the Gold Coast, the Straits Settlements, or Hong Kong could expect a salary of £800–£1,200 per annum in the early twentieth century, with quarters, a horse allowance, and a pension. The pension was a particularly important element: the average retiring age was 55, and the maximum pension was forty-sixtieths of the final salary for an officer with 30 years’ service. The pension was paid in sterling and was, in effect, a guarantee of a comfortable retirement in the home country.

The Colonial Civil Service in Africa

The colonial civil service in Africa was, in many respects, the most ambitious of the late-Victorian and Edwardian systems. The West African Frontier Force, established in 1897, was a military corps; the West African Police, the Gold Coast Constabulary, and the Sierra Leone Police were paramilitary forces with civil-service cadres. The Indian Political Service, established in 1901, was a separate corps for the North-West Frontier and the Persian Gulf; the Sudan Political Service, established in 1899, governed the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan until 1956.

The African civil service had a particular problem: the recruitment of senior African officers. The first African district officer in the Gold Coast was the Trinidadian-born lawyer James Hutton Brew, who served in the Gold Coast in the 1880s. The first African provincial commissioner in Nigeria was Kitoye Ajasa, appointed in 1928. The first African to pass the colonial administrative cadet examination was the Sierra Leonean physician Henry Lightfoot Boston, who passed in 1892. The number of African senior officers grew only slowly before 1945, and the great expansion came only in the post-war period.

The Colonial Civil Service in the Far East

In the Far East, the colonial civil service was a small but influential body. The Straits Settlements Civil Service, the Federated Malay States Civil Service, the Hong Kong Civil Service, and the Ceylon Civil Service (the last of which, alone in the British Empire, had been “Indianised” since 1833) were the principal cadres. The Malayan civil service was, by the interwar period, the largest of the four. The Indian Political Service, the most glamorous of the Far Eastern cadres, governed the North-West Frontier and the Gulf, and it was the training ground of a remarkable generation of British Indian officials, including Olaf Caroe and Evelyn Howell.

The Far Eastern civil services were distinguished by their professionalism, their relative openness to local recruitment, and their close association with the commercial and strategic interests of the City of London. The Hong Kong civil service, in particular, was recruited in close coordination with Jardine Matheson and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and the senior officers of the Hong Kong government were, very often, former employees of one of the great trading houses. The pattern was unusual, and the historiography of the Far Eastern civil services is correspondingly more developed than that of the African and Caribbean cadres.

The End of the Colonial Civil Service

The colonial civil service was abolished, in effect, in the 1950s and 1960s. The Gold Coast civil service became the civil service of independent Ghana in 1957; the Nigerian civil service became the civil service of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1960; the Malayan civil service became the civil service of independent Malaya in 1957, and of Malaysia in 1963. The Hong Kong civil service was the last to be modernised, with the introduction of the Local Officer Class in 1946 and the gradual localisation of the senior grades through the 1960s and 1970s. The handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was, in a real sense, the end of the British colonial civil service in the Far East.

The structural legacies of the colonial civil service are still visible. The Ghanaian Civil Service, the Nigerian Federal Civil Service, the Malaysian Federal Civil Service, and the Hong Kong Civil Service all retain the basic features of the colonial systems from which they descended: the senior executive class, the generalist administrative cadre, the pension scheme, and the traditions of propriety. The professional continuity is one of the most striking features of the post-colonial state.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the colonial civil service is less developed than the historiography of the ICS, but it has been growing. The standard works are D. A. Low’s The Government of India (1968) and Lions and Foxes (1967), which discuss the colonial civil service in the broader context of the late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial system. The Cambridge School’s revisionist account is represented in C. A. Bayly’s Empire and Information (1996). The more recent literature — represented by the works of Stephen Howarth, S. N. Sangwan, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire — has stressed the importance of the colonial civil service as a site of professional self-fashioning, of metropolitan ambition, and of post-colonial continuity. The unresolved question in the field is whether the colonial civil service is best understood as a system of metropolitan governance, as a generator of post-colonial professional classes, or as a particular form of imperial bureaucracy that, in the longer term, served its metropolitan masters less well than its post-colonial successors.

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