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The structure of British official attitudes: colonial Mauritius, 1883–1968*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Kenneth Ballhatchet
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Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 989 - 1011
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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109 Donald Mackenzie-Kennedy to A. Creech Jones, 7 and 22 Mar. 1947, CO537/2230/33,40.

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113 The colonial office nourished similar suspicions, CO537/2044/25091.

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