ABSTRACT
During the nine years when Freddie Madden and I were colleagues in Oxford, from 1948 when I succeeded Margery Perham in what was then called the readership in colonial administration until 1957, when he succeeded me in what had now become the readership in Commonwealth government, much of my research and writing were concerned not with the administration of British colonies or with the Commonwealth, but with what since 1945 had been called the French Union 1 and with what we can now see was the final phase of French (as of British) colonialism, at any rate in the sense of the maintenance of French jurisdiction over almost all of what had once been the French empire. This concern with the French Union was a consequence of the post-war re-establishment in Oxford of training courses for colonial civil servants. Whitehall considered that those on what was called the ‘second course’ – for men with some years' experience in the colonies – should study, among other things, ‘British colonial aims’ and ‘comparative colonial administration’. 2 It fell to my lot to undertake the teaching of French colonial administration as part of this course. For this my qualifications were slight. In November 1945 the Colonial Office and the Ministry of Overseas France had initiated a programme of technical cooperation in Western Africa. 3 1 had been the secretary of the British team at the initial talks in London, had taken part in almost all the subsequent meetings in Paris and London, and had been present at the earliest of the specialist meetings in West Africa, on veterinary problems in Dakar in May 1946 and on medical cooperation in Accra in the following November. I had also made very brief visits to Senegal and French Togo. In the course of all this I made the acquaintance of many French officials, both in the Ministry in Paris and in Africa, of some of those in the academic world in Paris, who had overseas interests and experience, and had met some French ministers, including Marius Moutet and René Pleven. But if I was to teach British colonial civil servants something about French colonial administration I must obviously try to learn for myself ‘on the ground’.
