Archival Significance
Cohen was Assistant Under-Secretary for the Colonial Office’s Africa Division and a principal architect of Britain’s post-war devolution policy, including the 1950 negotiations for the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This is a first-hand policy account from inside the Colonial Office rather than an outside commentary, making it a primary-adjacent source for how British administrators justified and managed decolonisation.
Institutional Context
Published the same year Cohen left the Colonial Office to become UK Permanent Representative to the UN Trusteeship Council, the book sits at the transition between direct colonial administration and the independence era. It was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and by Michael Blundell, situating it within contemporary settler-establishment debate on the pace of African advancement.
Content Summary
Sets out British aims and methods in colonial Africa: the administrative structures of indirect rule, the machinery of constitutional advance, and the emerging tension between nationalist movements and tribal loyalty, addressing the practical problems of transferring power in Ghana and Kenya specifically.
Research Utility
Useful for researchers tracing the intellectual framework British administrators applied across the continent, and for comparing that framework against how it was actually applied in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland specifically, a comparison the book itself does not make, since its scope is pan-African rather than regional.
Abantu Archives Note
Held in-house. Catalogued under Africa given its explicitly continent-wide scope, rather than Rhodesia specifically.