On 24 June 1930, the Governor of Nyasaland opened the first session of the Advisory Committee on Education; the Committee had been constituted in accordance with the recently enacted Education Ordinance to replace the Board of Education. He observed that the Ordinance was ‘a radical change in our education policy’ because ‘it does not attempt to control education: schools of any description however inefficient may be opened’.

Using the expression ‘late-colonial State’ obviously induces not only a chronological differentiation, but also some kind of specific institution. Is it possible to show that colonialism changed courses at an identifiable moment in time? If one observes the realities of the colonial presence in French Occidental Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française: AOF), and more particularly in the nomadic zone, a superficial glance could make one think the opposite is true. Nomads of the AOF and the area of land they travel are hardly obvious examples of ‘the colonial development’. The conquest of the Saharan areas was carried out with difficulty, hindered by immeasurable distances, the logistic difficulties of mounting and supply, the ignorance of the routes and wells, and especially the resistance to the French colonial regime from the Moorish and Tuareg nomads. The French managed to impose a lasting peace only after the Tuareg revolts of 1916 and 1917, after the fall of Djanet in the early 1920s, and finally after the pacification at the beginning of the 1930s of the last pockets of Moorish ‘dissidence’, putting an end to the raids against colonial establishments along the Niger river and in Adrar des Ifoghas. French soldiers and administrators initially held a certain mistrust towards the turbulent nomads. This feeling, combined with the apparent economic uselessness of the huge desert spaces they inhabited, makes it possible to understand that the essential efforts of colonial France were concentrated on military aspects and on keeping law and order within the major strategic routes connecting the southern and northern African possessions through the Sahara; routes that in these areas represented creations of major infrastructure.

The historiography of the decolonisation of the French overseas empire offers its students a highly mixed picture. While the atrocities committed during the independence wars in Indochina and Algeria belong to the black pages of contemporary French history, the decolonisation of the French sub-Saharan territories is presented in a much more positive light. In 1960, France ‘gracefully’ agreed to the independence of fourteen of its African territories, after which close relations with the regimes of nearly all those states were nurtured until at least the 1980s. This smooth transfer of power is all the more remarkable when one compares it to the much more problematic British and Portuguese decolonisations in black Africa. How did the French do it? Or should one say: how did the Africans in the French territories do it? In this paper, I will attempt to unveil some of the critical political processes that took place in Senegal at the end of the 1940s, because this period was crucial in the formulation of die relation between French policymakers and an upcoming African political elite. In many ways, die processes that took place in Senegal during this period would determine die course of French policy towards all of its African possessions. A study of this period seems therefore more than justified.

Since their independence in 1975 the former Portuguese African colonies of Guiné, Angola and Mozambique have been notorious for their instability, while the microstate of Sāo Tome has sunk to become one of the poorest and most debt-burdened countries in the world. The easiest explanation for these disasters can be found in the circumstances of the Portuguese withdrawal from Africa and the maelstrom of the final phases of the Cold War in which these states became embroiled. But are these explanations adequate?

Among the most entrenched criticisms of the record of European colonial rule in Africa is that it discouraged, or actively obstructed, the emergence of diversified colonial and post-colonial economies. Specifically, it is normally argued, the colonial state failed to create the climate in which industrialisation might have been possible. The two basic explanations advanced for this policy of neglect were a desire to ensure that the colonies continued to provide the metropolitan economies with a steady supply of desirable commodities, and a concern to protect the market share of metropolitan exporters. Critics of the colonial legacy, across the ideological spectrum, have often assumed that ‘development’ was a condition which could only be achieved through the process of industrialisation, and that specialisation in commodity production for export could not have been in the colonies' long-term interests. Moreover, in the late colonial period, industrialisation had come to be seen by many as a measure of a state's effective autonomy and economic ‘maturity’, as witnessed by the sustained attempts by many former African colonies to promote their own industrial sectors, often with substantial state involvement or assistance. While it cannot dispute the obvious fact that in most of late colonial Africa, industrialisation was negligible, this paper will offer a refinement of conventional assumptions about the colonial state's attitudes towards this controversial topic. Drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly that pioneer of decolonisation, West Africa, and focusing on the unusually fertile period in colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it will suggest that the British colonial state attempted, for the first time, to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development.

Les Etats coloniaux, en dépit de leur origine extérieure et de leur imposition brutale en Afrique, développèrent des liens organiques avec les sociétés colonisées. C'est ce qu'ont montré en particulier Bruce Berman et John Lonsdale dans leur analyse sur la ‘formation’ de l'Etat colonial, c'est-à-dire la capacité de celui-ci à être en partie modelé par les sociétés dominées afin de survivre. L'Etat colonial tardif (late colonial state) en Afrique équato-riale française obéit comme d'autres à ce principe, et l'on ne peut découvrir savraie nature qu'en se détournant d'une approche strictement chronologique occupée à découvrir le moment et les causes de son déclin, au profit d'un questionnement sur les conséquences locales et à long terme de cette période. C'est la raison pour laquelle, à parcourir la trajectoire classique des décennies terminales de l'empire français dans cette zone, on préfèrera sonder la mise en place dans cette région d'une culture du politique dont les effets de continuité modèlent encore aujourd'hui les comportements publics.

In Tapanuli, a province in western Sumatra, economic expansion in the late colonial period was frustrated by the problems of transportation in its mountainous and inaccessible terrain. In 1921, Resident F.C. Vorstman of Tapanuli stated in his succession report: ‘The construction of main roads is one of the most powerful means to improve economically backward regions’. This statement is not very surprising in itself, but it does reveal that some government officials had a clear idea of the impediments of economic development in the Outer Islands of colonial Indonesia, and how these obstacles could be overcome. As I will argue in this contribution, the development of infrastructure was one of the major factors in a process of increasing economic integration in Indonesia in the late colonial period. Moreover, infrastructural improvements were more significant in stimulating national economic development than the government policies under the Ethical Policy.

What was the ‘late colonial state’ in India? Purely chronologically, it might be taken to be a period from the 1920s or the 1930s onwards; but this is with the benefit of hindsight. Most writers are in agreement that, despite the political rhetoric of British imperialism in India, it was not until the Second World War that an actual withdrawal from India was seriously contemplated by Britain, with the definite reservation that matters of imperial importance such as defence and economic interest should be controlled by Britain as far as possible. If an acceptance by the colonial power of impending decolonisation is to be the basis of such a characterisation, then it is doubtful whether there was a late colonial state at all. If, on the other hand, a difference in the forms of control and of exercise of power over the colony from earlier periods is to be the basis of the characterisation ‘late’, then perhaps there is more of a case for a use of the term ‘late colonial state’ as more than a mere chronological device.