In 1973, Paul Howell, supervisor of the University of Cambridge Course on Development, noted with pride that the content of the course had recently changed. Rather than trying to teach ‘what the natives need to know’, it was now tailored to the real needs of its students, primarily drawn from developing countries, especially those within the Commonwealth.Footnote ¹ The fact that in the preceding decade – some years after most British colonies had secured their independence – those teaching this course could still be construed as having been engaged in telling the ‘natives’ what they needed ‘to know’ reflects the complex dynamics of the British decolonization process, and the ways these played out in a domestic context. The Cambridge Course on Development was a legacy of British colonialism: a direct descendant of training courses delivered since the 1920s to young British entrants to the Colonial Administrative Service that survived into the postcolonial era to become, with modifications, a flagship element in Britain's contribution to the training of administrators in the public services of new states. In the 1950s small numbers from Britain's colonies and newly independent countries sat alongside expatriates still hoping for a career in the Colonial Service; by the early 1960s they constituted the entire intake.

The figure of the expatriate colonial officer, whether the heroic Sanders of the River or the more subversive depictions in the fiction of George Orwell or Somerset Maugham, has particular traction in popular ideas of empire, and few of the continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial era speak to the ambiguities of ‘decolonization’ as much as the presence at British universities of elites from countries newly freed from the British colonial yoke occupying desks once filled by generations of white British officers. These public servants of new Commonwealth states entering British higher education in the late 1950s and early 1960s were nonetheless only part of a much wider educational migration. Britain had a long tradition of recruiting overseas students, including from the Empire-Commonwealth, but the late colonial period saw an enormous increase in their numbers. By 1960, the year in which Macmillan's landmark ‘wind of change’ speech heralded an accelerated retreat from Britain's African Empire, Britain hosted over 31,000 students from British colonies and the independent Commonwealth enrolled on all kinds of training and higher education programmes.Footnote ² Yet more striking, more than 14,000 pensionable officers were still serving in Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service and a further 6,500 employed on contract terms still working overseas in some fifty countries.Footnote ³ In 1965 officials in Britain's new Ministry of Overseas Development, struggling to marshal sufficient resources and manpower to meet the need for technical assistance among emergent states within the Commonwealth, called for the mobilization of personnel across British society. A British ‘professional career’, they suggested, ‘should normally include a period of work overseas in a developing country’.Footnote ⁴ By then the Commonwealth had been transformed from an association comprising a small number of predominantly white countries into a large multiracial community of states of diverse size and geostrategic interests.Footnote ⁵ Although a process of imperial retreat would continue in relation to smaller territories, most of the Empire had gone, and Britain had entered an era that many would consider ‘postcolonial’. Yet even at the start of 1965 there still remained over 13,000 publicly funded Britons working in developing countries, including more than 11,000 British officials distributed across forty-one colonies and ex-colonies;Footnote ⁶ a number comparable to those employed in the Colonial Service at the height of Empire.Footnote ⁷ An on-going British involvement in emergent Commonwealth states engaged the resources of diverse British institutions and individuals, and, ensured that the formal ‘end’ of the British Empire not only left many legacies within Britain itself, but numerous threads and entanglements linking governments, institutions and individuals in Britain and its former colonies.

This book explores some of these aspects of the British end of the British Empire and Britain's transformation from a colonial power to a postcolonial one. It does so in part via a discussion of British governmental overseas civilian and military aid, but principally by means of a history of the overseas engagements of several British institutions: the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Bank of England, the Royal Mint and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. These were all primarily domestic institutions, but had to differing extents become stakeholders in Britain's Empire, responsible for delivering or managing services to the colonies.Footnote ⁸ Oxford and Cambridge had many connections to Empire, including that on which this book focuses: their role in training members of the Colonial Administrative Service. This dated back to the 1920s, but after 1946 principally took the form of a year-long course attended by new Service recruits. The Bank of England's imperial role was the consequence of the City's place as the world's leading financial centre and its responsibilities to sterling as an international reserve currency. The Bank was directly involved in the dependent Empire via the management of the sterling area and its representation on some regional colonial currency boards, which, in the absence of national or central banks and independent currencies, issued and managed colonial currencies. In the course of the nineteenth century the third institution, the Royal Mint, had also taken on an increasingly international and imperial dimension when it began producing coins for other countries, including those within the British Empire. It had overseen the establishment of branches in Australia, Canada and South Africa and, although by 1945 some of these overseas branches had thrown off British control, the Mint continued to supply coins for colonial currency authorities in most British dependencies. Sandhurst's ‘imperial role’ channelled an important aspect of the wider imperial function of the British Army. Generations of British Army officers, trained at Sandhurst, had been deployed somewhere in Britain's Empire, principally as a result of the British Army's peacetime role garrisoning the colonies, but also in active combat in Britain's numerous nineteenth-century colonial small wars and in the global conflicts of the twentieth century. British officers were also seconded to command colonial forces. Since 1861 Sandhurst had had another more direct ‘imperial’ function, training British, and in the 1920s Indian, entrants to the Indian Army; after the Second World War it began admitting increasing numbers of cadets from Britain's remaining colonies and from new Commonwealth states.

These and other institutions provided the frames in which many lives were lived out across the Empire,Footnote ⁹ or through which even those who never left British shores might nevertheless be participants in the enterprise of empire. As Tamson Pietsch argues in her discussion of academic networks before the Second World War, institutions created opportunities for global interactions and exchanges, while also regulating and directing them.Footnote ¹⁰ They helped forge professional linkages that connected the different worlds of the British Empire, and that constituted what Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson describe for an earlier period as the ‘software of empire’.Footnote ¹¹ In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, as the structures of imperial rule were rolled back, such institutional and professional connections beyond the state became more, not less, important. By building these domestic institutions into a history of decolonization, this book contributes to the furthering of discussion of the processes of decolonization below the level of Westminster policymaking and above the level of the individual, the two themes around which many other accounts are constructed.

The decision to approach the history of colonial-political change from the perspective of these particular domestic institutions derives from my long-standing interest in two areas: the history of decolonization as it affected British organizations beyond the state; and secondly, processes of institution-building in new states accompanying the creation of Westminster-style parliamentary systems. These interests led to an earlier book on British business and the end of Empire in Ghana, which, together with others’ research, helped illuminate the ways in which decolonization affected British firms operating within the Empire. This work explored the firms’ attempts to influence both imperial policymaking and colonial-political outcomes,Footnote ¹² and my own investigation of the establishment of a Ghanaian central bank sparked an interest in the Bank of England as well as in the Royal Mint.Footnote ¹³ More recently, this engagement with how the end of Empire reverberated beyond the state has led me to explore its impact on the domestic Church of England.Footnote ¹⁴

Like the Established Church, but unlike British businesses, the institutions discussed in what follows lay on the boundaries of the ‘state’ narrowly defined, which for these purposes we can describe as the Westminster and Whitehall policymaking centre. They were part of the interface between the state and civil society. They had their own lines of dialogue with the state, and were in some cases formally part of it. They could invoke the state more easily than, for example, most British companies were able to do (although some of the latter, especially where their activities bore directly on Britain's strategic interests, naturally had considerable leverage in Whitehall). In our period, the universities had the weakest ties to the state. Even so, they relied on state funding, including support for their role in delivering the Colonial Service training courses, and there was individual career mobility between departments of governments and the universities, with academics appointed to government committees serving as bridgeheads between these interconnected and porous worlds.

The British polity, however, was pluralistic in character and these institutions had acquired or been given a sense of agency, reflecting the distinctive nature of British political culture. They could not operate entirely independently of the state, but, even if subject in principle to ministerial control, still acted with considerable autonomy. As Patrick Joyce argues, the British state, as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a ‘liberal’ one, not only because it was based on principles of political liberty, but also because it was one which permitted persons, places or institutions, which Joyce describes as ‘designated governed entities’, to operate ‘ostensibly on their own, without outside interference’.Footnote ¹⁵ What is more these might be perceived as distinct from the British state, and their separate identities would be important in their ability to negotiate a changing overseas landscape brought about by decolonization. Within the British system institutions beyond the state also contributed to the business of governance, as Oxford and Cambridge did by training Britain's imperial administrators. Further, within British political culture there was a consensus even among public servants (in the British case generally Oxbridge-educated rather than professionally trained) about the desirability of limiting central state power, that reflected the particular cultural capital of institutions such as Britain's oldest universities.

At different times, these institutions had all been more independent of the state and had evolved their own institutional cultures. Established in 1694, the Bank of England became banker and creditor to the government. At its inception those who subscribed to a loan to the state were incorporated as the ‘Governor and Company of the Bank of England’. Over time, the Bank assumed responsibility for managing Britain's gold and currency reserves and for holding the reserves of Britain's other banks; acquired monopoly control over the note issue in England and Wales; and helped manage government borrowing, serving as the ultimate source of credit or as lender of last resort. By the end of the nineteenth century it had largely ceased to operate as a commercial bank and become in effect a public institution serving the national interest, acting as advisor to the Treasury. Yet the Bank was also part of the financial service nexus of the City, with most of its governors drawn from City institutions and companies, and it continued to be owned and controlled by private shareholders until nationalization in 1946.Footnote ¹⁶ Even then, although nationalization transferred responsibility for the appointment of its most senior figures to the government, the Bank continued to operate relatively free from ministerial control. Rather than diminishing its independent culture, nationalization seems initially to have encouraged the Bank as far as possible to maintain its autonomy from the Treasury. For its part, the Treasury generally continued to respect the Bank's position as an independent source of expertise. It was not until the 1960s that the Bank became a more integral part of government policymaking structures, with a corresponding erosion of its standing as a voice articulating City interests.Footnote ¹⁷

The Mint occupied a similarly indeterminate position between ‘state’ and ‘society’. By far the oldest of the institutions discussed, its origins go back to c. 650 and the foundation of a London mint. Until Henry VIII's closure of the last remaining ecclesiastical mints concentrated all coin production at the Tower of London, it was just one of many mints in southern England. The Mint operated independently by Royal prerogative, but in 1688 was brought under the control of the Treasury.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1870 a new constitution made the Chancellor of the Exchequer titular head, or Master, of the Mint, and overall management of the mint was vested in a Deputy Master and Comptroller, appointed by the Treasury. Staffs were recruited from other government departments or through the Civil Service Commission. The Mint nevertheless had a more distant relationship with the Treasury than the formal arrangements might indicate,Footnote ¹⁹ and it occupied an anomalous position within the public sector, engaging in commercial sales as well as discharging its primary responsibility to manufacture coin for domestic circulation. Beginning with changes in 1975 this commercial role was rationalized, culminating in 2010 with the Mint's transformation into a limited company, albeit one wholly owned by the government. It is a parastatal commercial organization of a kind that has received relatively little attention from historians.

On a spectrum from ‘state’ to ‘nonstate’ the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, while from their medieval foundation intended to serve the twin needs of church and state, were in some respects more obviously at the periphery, although from the mid-nineteenth century they became subject to greater state regulation. Legislation in 1854 and 1856 intervened to make them less religiously exclusive, which together with the Northcote-Trevelyan civil service reforms, aimed at the creation of a public service class. Further legislation in 1877 stipulated that research and teaching should be among the aims of the universities, while governments also had patronage over some key university appointments. The establishment of the University Grants Committee (UGC) in 1919 and introduction of state funding, in 1923 to Oxbridge, but earlier elsewhere, represented a further development in the relationship of universities to the state with the new Committee instituting quinquennial university reviews. The universities nonetheless retained considerable independence from the state, with government funding accounting for only a proportion of university income and the UGC not inclined towards intervention.Footnote ²⁰

In contrast, in our period Sandhurst was more subordinate to Whitehall. The Academy was re-opened by the War Office in 1947, when the Royal Military College Sandhurst, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, merged with the Royal Military Academy Woolwich. The latter's origins lay in 1741, when an academy had been opened on the site of the workshops of the Royal Arsenal to train recruits to the army's technical branches. Historically the RMC had had a fluctuating relationship to the state. It was built during the Napoleonic Wars with government money, but the return to European peace saw a steep decline in military spending,Footnote ²¹ and for a period the loss of all state support. Government funding was provided again after the Crimean War, and by 1878 all infantry and cavalry officer cadets of the British Army, as well as entrants to the Indian Army, attended either Sandhurst or Woolwich.Footnote ²² Sandhurst had its own distinct institutional culture, but it lacked the capacity for independent initiatives that characterized some of the other institutions. In particular, it did not operate independently of the Army, although the latter was itself not unpolitical, and constituted another ‘player’ within Britain's pluralistic system, competing for resources within Whitehall as a whole and in relation to Britain's other services, the RAF and Navy.Footnote ²³ Sandhurst was run by officers in the British Army, appointed to the Academy for relatively short periods, and responsible through the Army's executive, the Army Council, to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the Secretary of State for War.

Situated on the margins of the state or beyond, each of these institutions had assumed some form of imperial role and constituted part of the apparatus of the British imperial system. Together they reflect how within that system power was dispersed across the ‘state’ and ‘society’. Insufficient attention has perhaps been paid to this – for all that the pluralistic nature of British imperialism is well established,Footnote ²⁴ and postcolonial studies and the ‘new imperial history’ have illuminated the different forms which ‘power’ assumed within colonial contexts and the variety of sources from which it emanated.Footnote ²⁵ The mixed economy of the British imperial system continued into the twentieth century and was even reinforced by the mid-century expansion of the state, not least because of the development in this period of social sciences and increased reliance on the ‘expert’. In British colonial administration, as in other spheres of public life, numerous specialists were appointed to advisory bodies and investigatory commissions,Footnote ²⁶ continuing and extending the plurality of the British system. As I will argue, while these experts and institutions were bound to the state in multifarious ways, their knowledge gave them ‘power’ of a semi-independent form. Conversely the co-option of experts and institutions within structures of imperial administration provided the context in which they acquired new expertise – ‘knowledge’ – which was sometimes thereafter the platform from which they might make their own interventions in the decolonization process. In these and other ways the plurality of the British system gave rise to a multiplicity of sites at which power was articulated, and generated distinct institutional cultures and dynamics. As we will see, the priorities of the Bank of England were not simply those of the Treasury, or the objectives of the academics delivering courses at Oxford and Cambridge those of the Colonial Office. Rather these domestic institutions could possess a form of corporate vocation, an ethos or sense of purpose, which could itself require adjustment in adapting to decolonization and the emergence of a postcolonial world.

As repositories of the knowledge useful to building the governmental and institutional structures deemed essential to independent nation-states, these different institutions utilized their expertise at the end of Empire by developing or becoming involved in delivering new programmes of technical education, and through diasporas of British personnel acting in an advisory capacity or seconded to senior roles within the new Commonwealth states. New states had an urgent and compelling need for assistance and had entered independence woefully ill-prepared, a legacy of colonialism and the speed with which they attained independence, unanticipated by many at the time. Postcolonial states were, Robert Jackson contends, ‘quasi-states’. Constitutional decolonization created ‘territorial jurisdictions’ recognized by the international community as sovereign states, but which lacked established institutions and the personnel to staff them.Footnote ²⁷ As we shall see, initiatives on the part of domestic institutions that had become stakeholders in Empire became part and parcel of Britain's package of ‘technical assistance’ to new states.

The exploration of these initiatives will demonstrate an on-going sense of ‘imperial mission’ – or perhaps more accurately ‘Commonwealth mission’ – in a variety of different institutions enduring across the era of decolonization. In private, British officials were realistic about the political difficulties inherent in the translation of the ‘old’ Commonwealth into the ‘new’, a process that began with the admission of India and Pakistan, and in which India especially became a significant player and source of influence among decolonizing African states.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, this sense of mission reflects the purchase that a Commonwealth ideal attained in public discourse and consciousness after the war, not least because, as Richard Toye argues, Labour and Conservative politicians ‘recruited’ the Commonwealth concept into political debate for their own purposes and, in this rhetorical process, the Commonwealth idea was created as a ‘public phenomenon’.Footnote ²⁹ That a common sense of mission can be identified across quite different institutions within and beyond the state also reflects the values common to British elites, a product of their shared academic and social background.

Individuals were highly significant in fashioning these institutional cultures and practices. This was notably the case at the Bank of England, where institutional cultural norms were shaped by one governor of longstanding tenure. The case study of the Mint similarly shows the importance of individual, dynamic leadership at a potentially destabilizing moment, and illustrates, as others observe, not only that institutions are ‘remarkably durable’, but how for institutions crises can ‘create opportunities of breakthrough’.Footnote ³⁰ Appointment and promotion policies allowed values to be cascaded down institutional hierarchies and reproduced, ensuring that they continued to shape institutional cultures. Where British officials were seconded or transferred to emergent Commonwealth states, their return saw their experience fed back into the institutions, sometimes helping sustain interest in the Commonwealth. Equally, institutional lobbying, as those within institutions acted to preserve and perpetuate their own activities, also resulted in their values and distinct, institutionally informed, perspectives percolating up within the British system, feeding into wider assessments and shaping broader policy outcomes.

This consideration of the history of a range of important British institutions – some of which were not principally ‘imperial’ – will hence be revealed as being as eloquent of the prevalence and development of cultures of imperialism (and the supposedly ‘post-imperial’) as perhaps more obvious conjunctions and sources, such as the press and other media, or debates around immigration. In particular, it will be argued that British institutions exercised their own ‘imperialism’ at the end of Empire as they sought to substitute new roles for their established ones within the imperial system.

Whether to advance commercial interests or from a more disinterested sense of responsibility and service, British actors and institutions aimed to embed specifically British practices and customs rather than advance less specific ‘Anglo-American’ western values, in ways that correspond to Harshan Kumarasingham's conclusions about a British commitment to exporting the Westminster parliamentary model and to Simon Potter's account of the BBC's role in the development of overseas broadcasting services and its efforts to disseminate a British model of public-service broadcasting.Footnote ³¹ Individuals within British institutions attempted to instil what they perceived as best practice, reflecting their own ideas of good governance. In particular, as they engaged in a process of institution-building, individuals within these institutions acted in ways that, rather than being simply a pragmatic strategy to secure economic interests or institutional advantage, were partly determined by British ideas of the state, and in particular of state power. Ideas of the distinctively liberal identity of the British state and its relations with civil society helped shape the policies and responses of a range of British institutions to the decolonization process. That is, Britons focused on the political neutrality of parastatal institutions and the independence from the state of institutions and organizations within civil society, in several cases by actively seeking to nurture an emergent African, professional, middle class.

In reality there were considerable gulfs between both British perceptions of a liberal and benevolent imperial mission and the often brutal nature of colonialism on the ground, and the power the British imagined they possessed to shape developments overseas and their actual ability to do so. They often struggled to exercise the control they wished, and their plans were frequently frustrated. Even so, in the twilight years of Empire individuals within institutions were able to exploit the last elements of Britain's imperial power structures as they sought to inscribe their practices and to advance their interests in a world in which there were influences in all directions, but where the power and force of currents was distinctly unequal. Domestic institutions beyond or on the margins of the state such as the Bank of England used their established connections to the Colonial Office, Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), or representation on advisory bodies to exercise as much oversight over new Commonwealth institutions as possible. Equally the presence of British officials overseas both in colonial administrations and the CRO, the British Crown Agents – who had a key role in appointing personnel and in procurement – and, after independence, networks of legacy personnel who remained in post, gave a strategic advantage to British institutions. Emergent states could, and did, however, exercise their new sovereignty. They sourced aid multilaterally, including from other powers and institutions equally convinced of the value of their own expertise and models for postcolonial modernizing projects. In the 1950s and 1960s these alternative sources included other countries in the ‘South’ as well as the West, while transnational communities of experts and development agencies also played a key part.Footnote ³² The two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were in particular potentially valuable sources of material assistance, as well as of alternative and competing models of development.Footnote ³³ Nor did local elites in emergent states simply accept uncritically British or other external models; rather they reimagined western ideas and developmental models, appropriating and deploying them in different ways and to their own ends within their own societies.Footnote ³⁴ Inevitably the British focus of this book precludes full analysis of these dynamics. Our primary purpose is an investigation of British initiatives and of their legacies in Britain itself. Nonetheless, to gain some insight into African responses to the activities and technical assistance programmes developed by the British state and British institutions, I draw on Ghanaian and Zambian sources, as well as those of some international organizations that became alternative, and sometimes competing, sources of expertise to the British.

To focus discussion, the following chapters principally explore the institutions in relation to political change in former British Africa from the 1950s. However, of necessity they ground the discussion of African decolonization within a broader geographical framework, since the institutions themselves did not necessarily differentiate between Africa and other areas of the remaining Empire, or even the remnants of an ‘informal’ Empire in the Middle East. Moreover, to understand the different experiences and perspectives of some of the institutions in the 1950s, we need also to take account of their earlier involvement in the ‘old’ Commonwealth and India, since this informed their approaches to African decolonization. Many of those who occupied senior posts within the institutions after the war had risen through the ranks in the interwar era, their mindsets shaped by their experience in dealing with the former white settlement colonies of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, or with India. In particular, the Bank of England's involvement with the new Commonwealth in the 1950s and 1960s can only be fully understood with reference to its previous engagement in the older Commonwealth states. Despite a historiographical shift to include the dominions in post-war histories of decolonization,Footnote ³⁵ they remain relatively marginal to accounts organized around the theme of ‘Empire's end’. Once we broaden our focus away from the state, narrowly defined, to incorporate other institutions that had assumed imperial roles in the pluralistic British system, the extent to which (for all the real differences in forms of rule and sovereignty across different locations within the British formal and informal empires) some contemporaries perceived developments in the dependent Empire in the 1950s within the same frame as those of an earlier era comes more firmly into view in a fashion that may be obscured by ways of ‘seeing’ the Empire derived from Britain's own Whitehall administrative division into ‘colonial’, ‘Indian’, ‘dominion’ and ‘foreign’.

The account that follows traces developments relating to the four institutions through to the 1980s. British decolonization was protracted, continuing in the late 1960s in relation to the southern African high-commission territories, and during the 1970s in relation to smaller island dependencies. It is impossible to understand either the ‘British end’ of the British Empire or the ways in which the British state and British institutions reconfigured their activities for a ‘postcolonial’ era without taking account of this drawn-out nature of British decolonization. It will be suggested that this is because the British state was ‘Janus-faced’: one part of it was focused on the still-functioning Empire, and the other half was adapting to a new post-imperial phase. What is more, the structures and legacies within these British institutions left by centuries of involvement with Britain's Empire at some point evolved to become distinctively different from those of the imperial era, ceasing to be simply ‘imperial hangovers’. The changes were nevertheless incremental rather than revolutionary, and to understand the full effects of empire and of British decolonization we need to adopt a long perspective.

Recent years have seen an enormous, and fruitful, expansion in the historiography of decolonization. We are now accustomed to thinking of it as something that involves much more than simply constitutional change and instead that affected and engaged a wide set of organizations and individuals within the former colonial empires, and had an impact ‘at home’ as well as overseas. Indeed whereas once historians treated decolonization as something of little bearing on British domestic history, and the domain of historians of empire, a wealth of new studies, building on several decades of scholarship concerning the ways in which imperialism shaped metropolitan society and culture in earlier periods,Footnote ³⁶ has exposed the limitations of what historian Stuart Ward dubs a ‘minimal impact’ interpretation of the British experience of the end of Empire.Footnote ³⁷ They range from considerations of imperial issues in post-war party politics to studies of British race relations and immigration, and analyses of culture and media.Footnote ³⁸ Alongside significant contributions by Wendy Webster and Stephen Howe,Footnote ³⁹ Ward himself opened up study of the cultural dimensions of decolonization in Britain in a pioneering edited collection of essays. Such work was richly suggestive of a post-war ‘culture of Empire’, but showed that this might take many forms: an enduring popular imperial culture, albeit one in which a ‘shift’ was occurring as a more unreconstructed imperial culture absorbed and reflected the post-war rhetorics of development and the Commonwealth; the cultural resonance of ‘decline’ itself; the ‘Empire coming home’, especially in the form of post-war Commonwealth immigration; and nostalgia for an Empire lost, as well as the struggle for ‘post-imperial’ national identity and purpose. Through analysis of cultures of Britishness at the Empire's end, including of how imperial retreat has stimulated devolution within the British union, Ward has subsequently explored other dimensions of the metropolitan effects of decolonization.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jordanna Bailkin's discussion of the post-war domestic welfare state has also shown the complex and varied ways in which imperialism and its afterlives shaped Britain itself, and Bill Schwarz how imperial constructions of race were of lasting significance in shaping white British identities.Footnote ⁴¹ Race and immigration are similarly prominent in Elizabeth Buettner's richly textured and highly engaging account of Britain and other former European colonial powers ‘after Empire’. With a view to showing how Europe was ‘recreated once its territorial expanse receded’, she focuses especially on movements of people in the form of both returning settlers and Asian, African and Caribbean immigrants to Europe, as well as on multiculturalism and memories of Empire in former European imperial metropoles.Footnote ⁴² A similarly comparative European approach also underpins Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle's edited collection exploring transnational cultures of decolonization. Among other things, they turn a spotlight on institutions of a cultural kind, such as museums, architectural practices and artists’ groups, and showcase research demonstrating how these provided a platform for ‘new artworks, displays and styles that promoted decolonization’.Footnote ⁴³

The history of domestic British institutions more generally at the end of Empire has, however, attracted little attention.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet, as I have suggested, domestic institutions like the Bank of England can be as revealing of cultures of imperialism as other more obvious sources. Moreover, by focusing on the four institutional case studies we can obtain a new perspective offering a clearer picture of the richly textured, complex and sometimes even contradictory cultures shaped by Britain's involvement in empire in all its different manifestations. These include ideas of race and class and also of imperial power, but were far from exclusively constituted by them, and these were imbricated with many others derived from far different sources or aspects of the imperial project in determining the imperial and ‘post-imperial’ cultures with which we are concerned.

In this respect, this book thus plugs a significant gap in our understanding both of decolonization and of the history of the institutions covered. The Mint and Sandhurst, the subject of Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, figure rarely, if at all, in existing accounts of the end of Empire, save for Catherine Eagleton's account of the design of coinage for Africa.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, neither institution has hitherto attracted much attention from modern historians more generally excepting those commissioned to produce institutional histories or in-house historians. Of the two, the Mint is the better served;Footnote ⁴⁶ accounts of Sandhurst were either published some time ago and concentrate on its more distant past,Footnote ⁴⁷ or have been produced for a general rather than an academic audience.Footnote ⁴⁸ There are several excellent histories of the British Army, in particular for our period by David French, but these offer only limited discussion of training and of Sandhurst specifically.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nor, despite literatures on colonial armed forces, on British counter-insurgency at the end of Empire, and British defence policy and decolonization,Footnote ⁵⁰ has much been written about British military assistance to new African states, and the training of overseas cadets at British military training establishments, a key focus in the discussion of Sandhurst in Chapter 6, although the rise of the military in politics in new Commonwealth states, especially in Africa, did lead to some investigation in the 1960s and 1970s of the ‘Sandhurst effect’.Footnote ⁵¹

There is similarly little that directly engages with the theme of Oxford and Cambridge and Britain's late colonial Empire,Footnote ⁵² discussed in Chapter 3, although there are extensive and growing literatures on the ways in which academic disciplines, notably the social sciences, were shaped by and shaped Britain's involvement in Empire, on academic networks across the British world, and on overseas students studying in Britain.Footnote ⁵³ Because this book addresses Oxford and Cambridge's involvement in Colonial Service training, Chapter 3 is as much about the Colonial Service as it is about the universities. The Service of course has its own historiography,Footnote ⁵⁴ but one that focuses more on the interwar and immediate post-war years than on the last years of African decolonization and that does not take up the issues addressed below.Footnote ⁵⁵

Of all the institutions represented in this book, the Bank, the subject of Chapter 4, has attracted most attention, not only in histories of the Bank and the City,Footnote ⁵⁶ but more specifically from historians of empire, most prominently P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins in their sweeping analysis of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and British imperialism, as well as in Catherine Schenk and Gerold Krozewski's important and more focused accounts of the Empire and the post-war sterling area.Footnote ⁵⁷ Chibuike Uche and Catherine Schenk have joined me in examining the development of central banking in Commonwealth states.Footnote ⁵⁸ But Chapter 4 highlights aspects of the Bank's involvement in post-war decolonization and in the development of Commonwealth central banking, which have not been explored before, and which can underpin a new interpretation of the Bank of England's role.

Elsewhere in the historiography there has been significant discussion of postcolonial African states that were, as Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, put it, not ‘properly institutionalized’ – lacking independent bureaucracies free from the control of those who hold political power, staffed by civil servants who regarded ‘public employment as a private resource’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet institutional development – the second theme of this book, alongside the exploration of the domestic workings out of decolonization – has attracted little attention in broad histories of decolonization, and generated only limited scholarship more generally, and this mostly in relation to defence, policing and intelligence.Footnote ⁶⁰ As we broaden our understanding of decolonization, to incorporate much more than the high politics of imperial policymaking and constitutional independence, this neglect of accompanying and secondary processes of decolonization is all the more striking. The theme featured in some of the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when focused studies of the fashioning of new institutions appeared for different regions and sectors, most numerous in relation to African armed forces,Footnote ⁶¹ and was addressed most directly in Richard Symonds, The British and their Successors.Footnote ⁶² But while perceptive and informative, these accounts were mostly written without access to the relevant primary sources, instead analysing near-contemporaneous developments the authors saw unfolding around them. Indeed, many of those writing on the theme of institutional development and transfer were themselves involved in the very processes they sought to analyse, including some on the academic staff at Sandhurst or Oxford.Footnote ⁶³ This flowering of contemporaneous studies of different aspects of state-building was itself a product of some of the same dynamics that underpinned the initiatives discussed in this book: another manifestation of a British liberalism that revolved around particular ideas of the nature of the state.

The process of ‘decolonizing’ colonial institutions and of developing institutions in new states is now beginning to attract renewed scholarly attention.Footnote ⁶⁴ But there remain many gaps in our appreciation of the historical development of institutions in new states at the end of Empire. Moreover, most existing studies of institutional transfer and development have been written about specific regions or sectors, most often the preserve of specialists in military or financial history, or of political scientists. This book therefore attempts for the first time since there has been access to the relevant primary sources for British decolonization to bring together empirical analysis across different sectors – administration, finance and defence.Footnote ⁶⁵ By assembling in one volume analysis of institutions normally discussed in quite separate historiographies this book brings into sharper focus the similarities across sectors and institutions. Poppy Cullen has recently shown in her impressive study of British relations with postcolonial Kenya that, although there was no ‘single dominant British interest’ in the country, a ‘combination of different aims and opportunities’ nevertheless made Kenya ‘particularly significant’ to Britain.Footnote ⁶⁶ In comparable ways this book hopes to show that the ‘whole’ is more than the sum of the parts, demonstrating just how comprehensively, and in mutually reinforcing ways, British officials and institutions, within and outside the British state, engaged in state- and institution-building processes in emergent Commonwealth nations.

In order to contextualize the later considerations of British civil and military technical assistance, Chapter 2, which focuses principally on the British state, explains why little consideration was given to, and little progress made with, institutional transfer, development and Africanization before the 1950s. It also identifies the dynamics and character of policies of technical assistance as an aspect of British international aid, including military assistance, essential for understanding the discussion of Sandhurst in Chapter 6.

Through this discussion – and that in subsequent chapters of the ways in which institutions discussed here delivered forms of technical assistance to new states – this book contributes to growing conversations about Britain's relations with postcolonial African states,Footnote ⁶⁷ international educational and technical aid,Footnote ⁶⁸ and of the colonial roots of the postcolonial development industry. Scholars were once slow to acknowledge the colonial lineage of modern development – perhaps as Uma Kothari suggests, because there was a ‘political imperative to distance the international aid industry from the colonial encounter’Footnote ⁶⁹ – but we now have more evidence of their interconnection. As Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel argue, ‘at the moment the much heralded “development era” crystallized, there was already in place a European knowledge-power complex which consisted of hundreds, or thousands, of experts, administrators, scientists, bureaucracies and financial resources that, due to the ending of colonial wars and control, could now be disbursed as grants and loans to the “underdeveloped world”’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Joseph Hodge and Véronique Dimier show that in the 1960s and 1970s people formerly associated with European colonial development went on to work in new roles in development bodies. Hodge shows how the postcolonial re-employment of former British personnel in such organizations contributed to a globalization of colonial development practice.Footnote ⁷¹ Dimier similarly demonstrates that former French colonial officials ‘recycled their imperial expertise’ through their re-employment in the European Commission's Directorate General for Development and Cooperation. Their interaction with an African elite corresponded, she suggests, to that of the colonial era, for example in systems of indirect rule.Footnote ⁷² My own book reveals other important colonial roots of postcolonial development practice and studies, as well as striking continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial eras. It also shows just how much the nature of British technical assistance reflected institutional priorities and agendas.

Before this we should begin, however, with a discussion of the ‘imperial’ roles of the domestic British institutions under consideration. This shows how the Mint and the universities had developed a vested interest in the perpetuation of their ‘imperial’ roles into the post-imperial era, and how the Bank of England – which had overseen the development of central banking in the dominions and India in the interwar period – developed a distinctive culture that equated Britishness with ‘good practice’, premised on a sense of British entitlement, as well as responsibility, to shape developments in the new Commonwealth. In this way it offers a point of departure for my wider project by showing that the decolonization process commenced at a point at which these British institutions were in varying degrees and ways more closely engaged in the Empire than ever before.