Colonial Bureaucrats, Institutional Transplants, and Development in the 20th Century

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 British protectorate in East Africa was on its way to becoming the independent state of Malawi in 1964. The aim of the training was to prepare African personnel for their duties in the higher civil service. Today, training local bureaucrats for duties in modern administrations is nothing new. It has been a core activity of development practitioners and international agencies since World War II.

See for example the information provided by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on capacity building. Online sourceifrc.org/en/what-we-do/capacity-building/.

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. There is a rich literature on colonial and postcolonial administration, state building and the failures therein.

Some entry points to this huge literature: Athul Kohli can serve as a starting point for the literature on colonial rule and development. Athul Kohli, State Directed Development, Cambridge 2004. Matthew Lange delivers a good account of direct and indirect rule in British colonies. Matthew Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development, Chicago 2009. Jeffrey Herbst has recently published a revised version of his classic on African colonies. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa, Princeton 2014 (2000). Finally, Selassie provides a very useful account from the point of an African bureaucrat. Bereket Selassie, The Executive in African Governments, London 1974. In the German literature the work of Andreas Eckert may serve as a first point of reference. Andreas Eckert, Herrschen und Verwalten. Afrikanische Bürokraten, staatliche Ordnung und Politik in Tanzania. 1920–1970, Berlin, Boston 2016.

Who are these bureaucrats and experts? Modern-day ›local capacity building‹ does not necessarily create 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. For the sake of my argument I will refer to them as ›tailors‹ to distinguish them from experts and bureaucrats in charge of transplanting who lack the specific skills or the experience to create a customized institutional copy.

Training local officials, as it is practiced today, will not necessarily create tailors. But it will promote the global dissemination of a relatively homogeneous body of standards in law and in governance. It is this dimension of capacity building that seems to be an integral part of international development efforts such as the Sustainable Development Goals propagated by the United Nations.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an international set of 169 development goals which is spearheaded by the United Nations. Online source sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.

In many cases transplanted institutions consist of bodies of imported law which to some extent conflict with local practices. An example: Even a rather uncontroversial, imported institution such as the road code can create dead law or the illusion of reform without its intended benefits.

See Dani Rodrik, »Second-Best Institutions«, in: American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 98 (2008), p.100–104, for a similar argument.

How can we get the transplanting process right? That is the problem which the research program presented here intends to investigate. We know from the few successful examples that the key to transplanting lies in the adaptation of the imported, foreign standard to the local context.

See Joachim Zweynert, »Economic Culture and Transition«, in: Intereconomics 41 (2006), p. 182–188; and Valentin Seidler, »When Do Institutional Transfers Work? The Relation between Institutions, Culture and the Transplant Effect: the Case of Borno in North-eastern Nigeria«, in: Journal of Institutional Economics 10 (2014), p.371–397.

Once we go back in history, we do find both types of experts employed as colonial officers in the British colonies in the mid-20th century. I will discuss British decolonization in more detail below. At this point it suffices to say that it was a period of intensified institutional reform and legal copying. Senior colonial officers held high positions in the newly created ministries and governmental agencies. Many of them stayed on after independence as advisors or as public servants in the service of the newly independent countries. Compared with the foreign experts and advisers of that time, they held very influential posts.

US experts formed the largest group of foreign advisers in British colonies. Most of them came as researchers, educators or fieldworkers sponsored usually by the Social Science Research Council in New York, the Ford Foundation or the Fulbright Program. The diaries of Wolfgang Stolper who was sent as an economic advisor to Nigeria in 1960 give a colorful and frank assessment of the individuals who determined economic policies at that time. Although the numbers of non-British experts rose in the mid-1950s, they were rare in influential, policy setting positions before colonies reached independence. After independence however and more generally after the mid-1960s, foreign aid donors and their advisers created the multilateral and sometimes hard to coordinate landscape of advisers and experts. Coordinating among these new players (a task of UN and OECD) often overworked competent local officials. John Lee, Colonial Government and Good Government, Oxford 1967, p.23–25, p.250, p.259–261. See also Wolfgang Stolper, Inside Independent Nigeria. Diaries of Wolfgang Stolper. 1960–1962, Cornwall UK 2003.

Lay magistrates or Justices of the Peace are a British institution which is still in use in many former colonies. They are judicial officers, civil servants of lower courts, who dispense justice or deal with legal administrative procedures. In Britain, lay magistrates need not have much if any knowledge of the substantive law or judicial procedures. They have professionally qualified Clerks of the Court to instruct them. In the Nyasaland of 1963, the first magistrates had no such luxury. There were no professional clerks to guide them – hence they had to learn both, the substantive law and the legal procedures at court. In England both these areas are covered by British law: the Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, neither of which is straightforward or easy to understand (still less to apply) without being trained to do so. However, in Nyasaland in 1963, the need for trained personnel was tremendous and so was the political pressure to supply them. The organizers of the training courses were given six months. In this situation Mr. Baker did what many other officers did around that time in the British colonies – he improvised. He single-handedly devised two rough and easy manuals, one of the Penal Code and one of the Criminal Procedure Code. The manuals and their content were designed to fit the education and training level of the students. They came with guides, slips of colored paper which mapped out the routes of procedures at court. His students would later use them on the Bench unseen by the public. The result may have been a very simplified copy of the real thing. The British Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code may not have been copied in all details. But we know today that these first lay magistrates in Malawi were, on the whole, successful. They secured public confidence in the law. If their decisions were reversed on appeal by a higher, professional court, they failed on procedural grounds rather than on grounds of reaching the wrong decision.

This account is taken from Colin Baker, Expatriate Experience of Life and Work in Nyasaland, vol. 5, Cardiff 2016 (forthcoming). The book is forthcoming in 2016.

While the episode above is an example of successful transplanting, the overall record of the British legacy in its former colonies is mixed. Botswana, for example, is regarded a success story in terms of institutions, while neighboring Lesotho is not.

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson, »An African Success Story: Botswana«, in: Dani Rodrik (Ed.), In Search of Prosperity. Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth, Princeton 2003, p. 80–119.

This article elaborates on this research agenda, which links the composition of the British colonial administrations in the mid-20th century with economic development, and presents the first findings taken from the biographical records of senior colonial officers. The next section introduces the theoretical concept of transplants and places the research agenda within the current economic debate on development.

A study by Daniel Berkowitz, Katharina Pistor and Jean-Francois Richard on legal transplants serves as the starting point for our discussion. The authors, two of them economists and one a legal scholar, use an empirical model to argue that the practice of importing foreign law has been largely ineffective, unless the law is intentionally adapted to the local law or unless there was already an initial level of familiarity within the population. Whereas adaptation is an intentional process in which foreign law is re-written to fit into the local legal context, familiarity is very rare. It occurs when countries share a close common culture and legal history (e.g. Scandinavian countries). Without adaptation or familiarity, the legal transfer is unreceptive – an outcome which the authors call the transplant effect. It is characterized by dead written law, legal and political bodies and public agencies without legitimacy, and often high levels of corruption.

See Daniel Berkowitz, Katharina Pistor, Jean-Francois Richard, »Economic Development, Legality, and the Transplant Effect«, in: European Economic Review 47 (2003), p. 165–195.

Economists argue that weak legal institutions are detrimental to economic and social development. A study by two Argentinean economists on illegal squatters in the suburbs of Buenos Aires showed that those squatters who randomly received a legal title to their hitherto illegal dwelling substantially reorganized their lives. Over the course of twenty years these squatters invested in better health and housing. They reduced the size of their households and cared for the education of their children. The only difference between them and their luckless neighbors was a piece of paper granting them a legal title to their home and to the small piece of land on which it rested.

See Sebastian Galiani, Ernesto Schargrodsky, »Property rights for the poor: Effects of land titling«, in: Journal of Public Economics 94 (2010), p. 700–729. The two authors, both economists, were initially looking for effects on the access to loans. They thought that the new property would be used to raise money and start a more productive business. While there were no or only modest effects on credit accessibility, the social factors (education, housing) were very strong.

The study by Berkowitz, Pistor and Richard has not been seminal in how economists or development practitioners think about development. In fact, transplants have been somewhat neglected in the ongoing academic debates on development.

See Nathan Nunn, »The Importance of History for Economic Development«, in: Annual Review of Economics 1 (2009), p. 65–92, for a fine review of where the debate stood in 2009.

The lack of academic interest in legal transplants is surprising, because a research program on transplants could not be more relevant. Institutional transplanting has been widely practiced over the last centuries. During industrialization, continental European countries aimed to reduce their relative economic backwardness towards the United Kingdom.

See Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective – A Book of Essays, Cambridge 1962 [1966].

Bureaucrats have been at the center of all these major attempts to transplant institutions. Their skills, their level of training and understanding of the transplanted law, are essential for the success or the failure of transplants. Economists call the body of knowledge, skills and personality of an individual, ›human capital‹. Development scholars consider human capital a central factor for long-run social and economic development. But more than 50 years after the term has been coined, the debate on exactly how human capital can increase developmental potential is still ongoing.

The concept of human capital has been made popular by Gary Becker in 1964 (Gary Becker, Human Capital. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education, Chicago 1964 [1993]). See Daron Acemoglu, Francisco Gallego, James Robinson, »Institutions, Human Capital and Development«, in: Annual Review of Economics 6 (2014), p. 875–912, for a recent contribution to the debate on how exactly human capital can deliver long run economic development.

The dozen or so Malawians destined to become the first lay magistrates of their country had probably little concern for such academic debates. They may have felt lucky that their instructor could run a crash course on substantial bodies of British law in the middle of Africa. From an academic perspective, the story is the beginning of new research program in which the decolonization of the British colonial empire provides the historical setting.

Between 1947 and 1997, 50 British colonies and territories gained independence (see Table 1). The recruitment in 46 of them was organized via the Colonial Office in London.

Countries in parentheses were not staffed by the Colonial Service. Examples are India which had the Indian Civil Service or countries that were administered by the Dominions Office in London (Southern Rhodesia, Namibia). St. Kitts is another name for St. Christopher (hence the parentheses here) and was staffed with officers from the Colonial Service in London.

Table 1

British territories and their dates of independence, 1947–1997. Countries in parentheses were not staffed by the Colonial Office in London.

With the onset of World War II, the pre-war vision of a dependent empire based on imperial trade and business interests changed radically. It was replaced by the concepts of ›development‹ and ›good government‹.; These notions were based on the idea that social reform in its widest sense was necessary for the political education of the local population. The so-called Fabian Colonial Bureau was established in 1940 and became an influential forum for the elaboration of colonial policy. Labour won the general elections in 1945 and its colonial policies accepted the Fabian position that the ›development‹ of the colonies could not be left to market forces and industrial interests. The imperial state was needed to bring about social and economic improvements and prepare the colonies for self-government. This was seen as the best way to retain the empire intact for as long as possible.

Paul Kelemen, »Planning for Africa: The British Labour Party’s Colonial Development Policy. 1920–1964«, in: Journal of Agrarian Change 7 (2007), p.76–98, here p. 81; and the Fabian Colonial Bureau, Cooperation in the Colonies, London 1945.

Maybe in response to these new players, the implementation of the new British development policy began with social welfare programs. The Colonial Welfare and Development Act of 1940, for example, established the principle that the British taxpayers had a duty to contribute to the development of the colonial peoples. This was a new doctrine which also added an extra dimension to the idea of good government. It was no longer enough for serving officers to uphold law and order and collect taxes. The new development philosophy gave colonial officers an active role in preparing the colonial subjects for participation in the political and industrial life of the territory.

Just like ›development‹, the term ›good government‹ was rarely defined in detail. ›Good government‹ was not initially designed to diminish the position of British officers within the territorial administrations. It became popular among colonial officials partly because it implied that self-government meant less competent administration and thus justified a long period of British control. The various development and welfare schemes, however, were intended to build a political class capable of running the machinery of the state. Whenever the local elite would reach the same (British) standards of governance, the transfer of power could follow.

See Ibidem, chapter 1.

Building the machinery of a state included more laws and institutions. These were closely modeled on what was considered good practice in the UK. The transplanting process itself can be imagined in a very concrete manner. Thousands of pages of legal text were drafted as colonies modeled their young democracies on the example of the British system. New departments and organizational units were created across colonies. They ranged from the departments and ministries to entities such as the National Lottery or the Tourism Bureau.

Jonathan Lawley, »Achievements of the British Colonial Service: A Retrospective View«, in: The Round Table 104 (2015), p.267–280, here p. 275.

Besides formalized structures, unwritten norms – ways of doing things – were transplanted, and these processes where less straightforward. An example: We know today that a civil service based on the principles famously put forward by Max Weber matters for economic development.

See Max Weber, Economy and society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, New York 1978.

Tours into the bush to keep in contact with Native Authorities were a core activity in a district officer’s life. The relationship between local chiefs and the colonial (later civil) district administrator governed tax collection, census activities or the delivery of justice in these areas. British district officers usually liked these ›tours‹, or they left the service. Many of them disliked the prospect of being transferred to a desk job in the capital. Unlike British officers many African civil servants who succeeded the British colleagues preferred urban employment to rural posts, which were considered backwaters and which provided fewer career opportunities. Ethnicity was a third factor. British officers were advantaged in being impartial to inter-ethnical tensions. In Malawi for example, these distinct personal incentives had a measurable impact once the handover to local Malawian district officers had been completed. The total number of district officers in rural posts declined gradually from 92 in 1960 to 77 in 1972 as local staff were reluctant to respond to the vacancies which became available when overseas staff left. At the same time the average length of service in this rank dropped from 7,2 years in 1960 to 4,4 years in 1970.*

Photograph 1

ments, and procedures safeguarding the integrity of civil servants.

See James Rauch, Peter Evans, »Bureaucratic Structure and Bureaucratic Performance in Less Developed Countries«, in: Journal of Public Economics, 75 (2000), p.49–71; and Weber, Economy and Society.

The fundamental problem may have been that Weberian principles were not necessarily compatible with local, patrimonial institutions shaping executive authority. The notions of integrity, corruption and political neutrality were doubtless known to individuals working inside the colonial administrations. However, the rules and processes safeguarding these standards may not have been recognizable as such. Moreover, they may have been considered overly burdensome to non-European staff. Without a prolonged time of working with the new regimes, their advantages would not become clear. This is the view of Amishadai Adu, who was one of the first Africans to enter the higher colonial service. A gifted administrator himself, Mr. Adu left his home civil service in Ghana and became an international consultant to the UN and to other colonies which aimed to reform their civil services in view of approaching independence. In 1965 he warned of overly complex structures, well-intended but hard to manage.

The Public Service Commission (Civil Service Commission, or simply Commission) was such an imported departmental structure. It was an organizational unit in charge of all personnel-related issues, such as the appointments of civil servants. After 1945 the British established Public Service Commissions in each colony to guarantee the political neutrality of local civil servants and prevent nepotism. Initially, Commissions were created as advisory bodies to the governor. The British were fully aware that the Commission was a foreign transplant and likely to find little support with ministers and members of legislatures, who preferred to control who advances into powerful positions within the civil service. A handbook advised overseas officers on how a Public Service Commission could be best established in the colonies and which problems were likely to occur.

Colonial Office, The Public Service Commission in Overseas Territories, London 1962.

Not everyone in the colonial service was able to produce tailor-made institutional solutions on the basis of British originals. Can we specify exactly which biographical characteristics it takes for successful institutional adaptation? A research agenda with the aim to advance our knowledge on the role of civil servants in the transplanting process needs to collect detailed information on the education level, skills, and length of stay in the country of civil servants involved. The material is complemented with historical analysis of corresponding colonial records and interviews with surviving officers. This latter part is ongoing.

The author is grateful for the support of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Study and the Austrian Science Fund (Erwin Schrödinger grant J3848-G28).

Table 2

Characteristics of the dataset on overseas officers.

In the 20th century the colonial service was an international body of territorial services, which, from the mid- 1950s on, was charged with its own dissolution. Compared with a typical civil service in a European state today, a few features of colonial services are worth noting.

While all members of the colonial service were servants of the Crown, they were employees of the territorial governments. Employment contracts were made between the colonial servant and the governor and paid out of the territorial budget. Only the recruitment of all administrative, managerial, supervisory, professional and senior technical grades was the responsibility of the Colonial Office in London with the help of the Crown Agents. Until 1945 almost all of these ›higher‹ or ›senior posts‹ were held by overseas officers – British subjects or members of the Commonwealth (e.g. Canadians, South Africans). Higher posts offered a lifelong career with starting salaries around 600 British pounds per year in 1950 for a customs officer. This amounts to roughly 19,000 pounds in 2016 terms.

The calculation is based on historical UK inflation rates (see http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/).

Until 1957 (for Nigeria) and 1961 (for the rest of the colonies), Britain made no direct financial contribution to the personnel serving in the colonies.

Williams, Technical Assistance, p. 23.

Overseas officers were organized in services which determined their career path and salaries. Teachers would be employed under conditions of the Education Service and doctors in the Medical Service – each with their own hierarchy, salary and ranks. The elite among these services was the Administrative Service, the members of which represented the governor in their colony and held (depending on the post and location) policy-setting, executive and quasi-judicial powers.

Colonial Office, Appointments in His Majesty’s Colonial Service, p. 147.

Because of the high degree of decentralization, the Colonial Office in London had strong documentation of the whereabouts of the overseas personnel but only a vague idea about the full size of the whole colonial service. In 1948, Charles Jeffries, then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, estimated the total size of the colonial service at about 300,000, of which roughly 11,000 were overseas officers.

Charles Jeffries, Partners for Progress, London 1949, p.28.

Even before independence movements shook up colonial administrations, the structure of the colonial service underwent important changes after 1945. First, a surge of new recruits entered the colonial service after years of very low intake during World War 2 (WW2). Between June 1945 and the end of December 1953, a total of 11,357 new overseas officers came in.

See Colonial Office, Colonial Overseas Service: monthly cumulative progress reports on vacancies filled from starting date of 1 June 1945, Reference: CO 1017/268, internal document released in 1984, London 1953–1955.

Figure 1

The post-WW2 intake increased the size and functions of the secretariat in the colonial capital. With the expansion of economic and social activities, more functional departments were added in the colonial secretariat. Department heads reported to the governor through a financial secretary (or through a chief secretary) who – together with the department heads and the governor – sat in the legislative council and the executive council. Here, the policies and their implementation were decided.

In preparation for independence the departmental structure had to make place for a more democratic system. Around the time of the first elections the legislative council turned into a legislative assembly, which was in charge of setting policies. On the executive side the departmental organization in the colonial administration was replaced by a ministerial system with a cabinet coordinating the activities of the ministers. As independence drew closer, a typical ministry was staffed with both local and overseas servants and headed by a local minister advised and assisted by an overseas officer (usually from the Administrative Service) as his permanent secretary.

Bereket Selassie, The Executive in African Governments, p.190, p. 193.

How can we spot the tailors – those officers with the abilities to customize imported institutions in these crucial years before independence? From what we know about successful transplanting, the following conditions must be met: For a British-born officer, a tenure of at least five years in a single country seems reasonable proxy for understanding the local context. Additionally, the officer must have reached an executive grade in his or her career path (service) in the year of independence.

For a local officer, tenure in the country is only needed if the officer is employed outside the territory of his birth. To understand the functioning of the imported law he would need training abroad. I use a foreign diploma as a proxy for several years of studying abroad. Just like his British colleague, the officer must have reached an executive grade in his or her career path (service) in the year of independence.

Does a typical personnel sheet of a colonial officer provide this information? A simple query in the dataset that looked for police experts in Africa produces the personnel record of Mr. Robert Langley (among many others).

LANGLEY, M. R. D. O.B.E. (mil.) (1952), M.V.O. (1947), D., (1958), C.P.M. (1947).—b. 1913; ed. Glenwood High Sch., S.A., and Cape Town Univ.; Police offr. (cadet), Swaz., 1933 ; Bech. Prot., 1935; supt. of police, 1943; dep. comsnr. and ch. immig. offr., 1947; comsnr., police, 1949; asst. comsnr., Uga., 1955; senr. asst. comsnr., 1957; dep. comsnr., police, 1958; dep. inspr.-gen., pol., 1962; retd., apptd. O.S.R.B., 1963.

What can we learn from this record? Mr. Langley was born in 1913 and educated at the Glenwood High School in South Africa. We can assume he was a South African. The records never fully disclose the nationality. He joined the colonial police force in the protectorate of Swaziland in 1933 aged 20. Cadet is the entry rank for police officers. Two years on he was transferred to neighboring Bechuanaland Protectorate, where he reached the highest rank in the protectorate’s small police force in 1947. The three tiny protectorates of Bechuanaland (today Botswana), Basutoland (today Lesotho) and Swaziland were administered by a High Commissioner in Cape Town, South Africa. It was common practice to exchange officers among them. What is a bit unusual is the fact that Robert Langley was not drafted for military service in World War II. Such an interruption of colonial service was very common among officers of his age group and would have been noted in the personnel record. Equally unusual is Mr. Langley’s rapid career, which becomes evident once we compare his career path with colleagues from police forces in East Africa. Add to this his decorations: Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1957, Member Victoria Order (MVO) 1947, and a colonial police medal in 1947. In 1949 he transferred to Uganda, a protectorate with a bigger colonial administration and a more substantial colonial police force. Compared with peaceful Bechuanaland, chances are Mr. Langley saw more action in Uganda, which had its share of riots in the late 1940s. In 1962, the year of Uganda’s independence, Robert Langley retired as the deputy inspector general, the second highest post in the protectorate’s colonial police. By then all British officers were offered a substantial payment for the loss of their career once the colony where they served gained independence. Robert Langley, aged 49, probably accepted the payment. His normal retirement age in East Africa would have been 55 years.

Colonial Office, Appointments in His Majesty’s Colonial Service, p. 83.

Photograph 2

The information that we can extract from the data on Mr. Langley is substantial. The photograph above was kindly made available by a colleague of his, who I happened to interview in 2016.

Between January 2016 and June 2016 ten semi-structured interviews with former colonial officers in Africa were held. All interviewees were selected upon referral of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association (OSPA). We are very thankful to OSPA for their invaluable help.

How does this matter for economic development? Most economists today agree that tailor-made institutions are fundamental for long-term economic growth. It matters, for example, whether the property rights of homeowners are guaranteed by a law and whether it can be enforced at an efficiently working court. This is unlikely when the public servants working in the judiciary are not appointed based on their competence but on kinship. In a similar manner, poorly understood or poorly enforced traffic laws invite corruption (by police officers) and lead to avoidable loss of human lives. We know that such dysfunctional institutions tend to lock in and persist over decades if not centuries. Development scholars today use aggregate indicators like the Worldwide Governance Indicators to measure the quality of the ›rule of law‹ in a given country, the effectiveness of its government or the ›control of corruption‹ within public services. ›Government effectiveness‹ for example, combines into a single group responses in questionnaires on the quality of public service provision and on the competence of civil servants, among others. Sources include organizations like Gallup, Afrobarometer or the Human Rights Database.

A full list of all sources and used to construct the indicators can be found in Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, Massimo Mastruzzi, »Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008«, in: World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series 4987 (2009). A caveat: Aggregate measures like the Governance Indicators are problematic for at least two reasons. First, the measures are interrelated. A country with a strong rule of law is also likely to have an effective government. Second, the indicators measure how close a country comes to an ideal standard of, say, how quickly a lawsuit can be resolved. A country with a legal tradition distinct from a global standard may still deliver a fair public service in the mind of its citizens which is not necessarily reflected in the indicator. With these shortcoming in mind, the Worldwide Governance Indicators appear strongly correlated with measures of human well being and development.

Richer countries can afford a better trained civil service. With this caveat in mind, governance indicators can serve as a rough gauge for the quality of a country’s institutions and its development potential. Indeed the variation of institutions across former British colonies and – more generally – across the world, is remarkable. Figure 2 on the previous page shows the measures for ›government effectiveness‹ in 1996 (the earliest available) for a number of former colonies plus China, Italy and the United Kingdom. The indicators assign scores to countries ranging from + 2,5 (most effective government) to – 2,5 (worst score). We can see that the quality of civil services in former British colonies varies substantially from Sierra Leone to Singapore. Measures for the control of corruption or the rule of law (not pictured) display a very similar distribution. Legal and political scholars as well as economists have long sought to explain these differences across countries.

Figure 2

There is good reason to believe that colonial officers influenced this variation in government quality across the colonies. Figure 3 returns to a connection postulated by Mr. Adu earlier in this text.

Figure 3

If Mr. Adu is right, then colonies which retained a high number of colonial officers after independence were better at building local ›tailors‹ – African civil servants with enough experience to tweak ›inherited structures‹. The information that we can deduce from the personnel records of nine African colonies alone lends support to Mr. Adu. Those colonies where colonial officers remained on after independence score substantially higher in terms of the effectiveness of their government.

The horizontal axis displays the number of years in which the share of overseas officers in the higher civil service remained between 75% and 25% for a number of African colonies at independence. The vertical axis measures government effectiveness in the year 1996.

The values have been increased by +2.5 to make a nicer reading on the chart. Hence the range of the indicator lies between 0 (worst possible) to +5 (best score).

At this point in time we should take the findings with a pinch of salt. Because both the study of colonial files and conducting interviews are very time-intensive, only nine African colonies were included in the analysis by spring 2016. Given the small number of countries in this comparison, the findings can only be indicative. Then there is also the possibility that third factors may explain why colonial officers decided to remain in Botswana but retire early in others (e.g. Sudan). It is important that these factors do not also influence economic growth or the quality of the government in question. This can indeed be shown for each colony, but this will require the space and the format of another article – the second in this research agenda.

In conclusion, it hardly seems surprising that the length of time during which outgoing British officers were available to hand over the administration to their local successors matters for the quality of the civil services they left behind. Yet this finding is new. Until today, development scholars have been debating how various levels of government effectiveness in Africa can be explained. There are many related questions which are equally interesting from a scholarly point of view. Technically trained officers employed in the railroad services or in agriculture may have impacted, say, the industrial output of a former colony in a different manner from officers with backgrounds in law or economics. For how long do experts in these fields need to be posted in a given country to reach their full potential as institutional tailors? Modern development efforts today could benefit from such knowledge. Furthermore, the career paths of over 14,000 colonial officers provide a rich source of information for scholars interested in the history of administrations. To prepare the material for a more general historical analysis the biographical records will need to be complemented with other collected colonial material and with the personal accounts, i.e. interviews, of retired colonial officers.

I am grateful for the tremendous help of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association (OSPA) and there members for their time and support.

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