On Company and Other Crown Service Overseas

Abstract

Part II examines the recruitment, composition, structure and work of the Administrative (in some instances and at some periods called Political) branches of Britain’s three principal overseas civil services: in the Indian Empire, in the Colonial Empire, and in the Condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In the century covered by this study, these were the imperial civil services which regularly offered a life-time career in government administration overseas to hundreds of young Britons educated predominantly in British public schools and graduating pre-eminently from British universities. No exact figure has been put on the total of Britons who chose this kind of career abroad, but an idea of the scale can be gathered from the following statistics for the twentieth century alone. Between 1919 and 1939 almost 1700 appointments were made to the Colonial Administrative Service, with a further 1500 between 1945 and 1950 and over a hundred in each of 1953 and 1957.1 The Indian Civil Service, with 950 posts held by Europeans in 1899, was still appointing an average of 30 British probationers a year in its years of declining attraction, 1925–35, following on 500 British appointments between 1904 and 1913 and a further 130 in the reconstruction years 1919–21.2 The Sudan Political Service had a total cadre in its existence of approximately 500 posts, every one held by Britons. All this was for the Administrative Services alone, without taking into account any of the professional men and women who sought an appointment in the Empire, averaging between 1919 and 1957 a further five hundred a year into the Colonial Service alone.