Abstract
Abstract The article presents a new research agenda which links the composition of the British colonial administrations in the mid-20th century with the economic development of former colonies. It presents the first findings taken from the biographical records of over 14,000 senior colonial officers which served in 46 colonies between 1939 and 1966. Legal transplanting, i.e. the process of copying foreign law into countries lacking them, is discussed as a common practice in international development efforts and as new approach in understanding long-term economic development. The approach puts emphasis on the senior bureaucrats who are in charge of institutional copying. Successful transplanting requires very specific training and personal experience in the receiving society. Colonial officers with such characteristics served in the British colonial administrations while decolonization provides a historic period of intensified legal and institutional transplanting.
Highlights
Training, Transplants and TailorsFrom 1962 to 1971, Colin Baker, an Englishman born in 1929 in Suffolk, found himself in charge of a series of legal training courses in Nyasaland
Until 1957 and 1961, Britain made no direct financial contribution to the personnel serving in the colonies.56. This naturally meant that poorer colonies had fewer financial possibilities and a smaller colonial administration compared to richer colonies
The vertical axis measures government effectiveness in the year 1996.71 Botswana for example took over 14 years to reduce the share of overseas officers (British and African officers who had already served as colonial officers before independence) to a value of below 25%
Summary
From 1962 to 1971, Colin Baker, an Englishman born in 1929 in Suffolk, found himself in charge of a series of legal training courses in Nyasaland. The activities summed up under ›local capacity building‹ are often regarded as a development goal in itself or as an important factor ensuring ›sustainable development‹.3 This text introduces a research agenda in which well-trained local officers serve a second purpose – to successfully transplant foreign institutions (such as the law) into societies lacking them. Training local bureaucrats merely enables them to fulfill functions in newly transplanted bodies of law It does not create individuals who are capable of building customized, tailor-made institutional solutions in the first place. In 1963 he was charged with training a dozen students, most of them in their mid-thirties, for their future role as lay magistrates We know from his personnel record kept by the Colonial Office that Mr Baker held a law degree from London. The story is the beginning of new research program in which the decolonization of the British colonial empire provides the historical setting
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