Kenneth Robinson, Historian and analyst of the British and French colonial empires, dies at 90
The Independant
Kenneth Robinson was a leading historian and analyst of the British and French colonial empires and their successor states, and Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London University before being appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong.
Born in London in 1914 and graduating in both Modern History and Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford, he joined the Colonial Office as an official in 1936. To start with, he worked in the West Indian Department (”riots everywhere”), moving on to the CO’s general department just before the Second World War, where he dealt with a very wide range of subjects, from passports and aliens to obscene publications.
During the war, he was posted to West Africa to work with Lord Swinton. Swinton was British minister in West Africa and Robinson was to be a member of his security executive. This proved a brief posting, when illness caused recall to Britain. There, he dealt increasingly with issues associated with the international accountability and control of British and other countries’ colonies, mandates and protectorates, subjects of enormous importance in developing relations with Britain’s leading wartime ally, the United States.
In essence, the wartime team of Hilton Poynton and Kenneth Robinson was concerned to limit the international control of colonial questions pressed by US interests at this time, while conceding the necessity of promoting “good colonial administration and the material well-being of dependent peoples”. As Robinson wrote subsequently in an article in International Organization (”World Opinion and Colonial Status”, 1954):
One of the more extraordinary illusions which surround this whole area of international relations is the conviction that the malpractices deemed inherent in “imperialism” can only be prevented by the intervention of “disinterested” states. These latter states, having no general national interest at stake, can afford only too easily to barter the misgovernance of these territories in return for some quid pro quo in the form of a vote on some matter of greater real interest to themselves.
Granted his wartime concerns, it is not surprising that Robinson should have written important essays on “The Dilemmas of Trusteeship” before the Second World War, published in book form in 1965, and devoted other essays to decolonisation and the international community after it.
Imperialism and the State in the Third World : Essays in Honour of Professor Kenneth Robinson
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