ABSTRACT
The coming of Joseph Chamberlain to the Colonial Office in 1895 opened a new era in west African policy. It was he who first tried to release expansion from the shackles of the old informal system. He was the first British statesman to prize west African territory highly enough to risk fighting France to get it. It was he who first called a halt to the long British retreat in the west. Chamberlain brought a new incentive to the British movement into tropical Africa. Its largest territorial claims hitherto had been collaterals of the supreme interests in the Mediterranean, in south Africa and in the Orient. Not until the eleventh hour did another, less sophisticated motive intervene: the aim of taking territory for its own sake as an estate for posterity. This was Chamberlain's special if belated contribution. It made little difference to the map of Africa by treaty, for most of that had been drawn already. Yet his radical approach to empire left a more lasting monument. Because he was the first Colonial Secretary to believe in the need for developing tropical Africa as a state enterprise, he set a new value on the possession of territory. He was too late to add much of it to the empire; but he inspired the beginnings of its modern administration and development.
