ABSTRACT
With these sentiments Devonshire agreed, and requested that a personal letter expressing the Colonial Office case be prepared for despatch to the Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain. This letter, sent on 4 January 1924, was carefully framed as an appeal to enlightened metropolitan self-interest. Depriving Uganda of financial resources was ‘quite incompatible with our settled policy that we should develop these African Dependencies to the utmost not merely in their own interests but also in those of the mother country’. Uganda had great possibilities especially as a cotton growing country, but ‘it really needs more liberal expenditure than that arranged between Milner and your brother in 1920 by means of a Development Loan’. It followed that it was indefensible for the Treasury to threaten to cut that loan in retaliation for the Colonial Office’s refusal to accept their terms for the repayment of the war debt.29
