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This chapter explores the role of middle-class West Indians and native Britons, who shared a vision of a British Empire sustained by a culture based on respectability, in creating BBC policies and broadcasts for the Caribbean from the 1940s to the 1960s. While striving to present to the West Indian audience the best of British and Caribbean culture, the London-based Colonial Service Department of the BBC, which included both native Britons and West Indians, advanced a color-blind version of middle-class Britishness, while also encouraging West Indians to explore their Caribbeanness. The Colonial Service declined as its focus on cultural uplift was challenged by regional differences, American culture, and a radio audience that had expanded well beyond the middle-class. Nevertheless, its success through the mid 1950s reaffirmed West Indians’ place in the British World in ways that would continue to resonate in the Caribbean and in Britain itself.

This chapter auto-critiques the editors early work (Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine, 2007) for studying the Colonial Medical Service as a distinct entity, founded and run on shared principles, staffed by Europeans and micro-managed from Whitehall. The collection of chapters is introduced, particularly emphasising how each essay originally contributes to revising this flawed interpretation. The Colonial Medical Service is argued as being flexibly responsive to local demands, open to negotiation and cooperation with non-governmental partners, and very much different in reality to the unified image that is often assumed. Theoretically this dramatically pushes forward understandings of the history of government medicine in Africa, not least showing scholars that history is always on the move and can be rarely compartmentalised, despite the active public relations agenda of the British colonial government.

This chapter deals with relations between the colonial medical service and major British missions in early colonial Malawi (c. 1891–1940). It focuses on the networks that connected missions with the medical service and co-operation between the two in information sharing, public health campaigns and the medical training of African staff. Then, the chapter analyses conflicts between missionaries and the colonial state, contests over authority and critiques of policy and practice. Co-operation between the British missions and the colonial medical service in Malawi was extensive and mutually beneficial, but there were also important areas of conflict and contestation. These clashes were kept mostly private, as both sides attempted to present a united front as medical collaborators. However, Western medicine in colonial Malawi was not monolithic or marked by simple dualism between state and missions. Medical practice, practitioners, knowledge and materials were constituted, transferred and connected in complex imperial networks that included Medical Officers, missionary physicians and various medical middles.

The Zanzibar Maternity Association (ZMA) was a charitable organisation established in 1918 to help Zanzibari women during parturition. Majority funding came from the Arab and Indian communities who, correspondingly, had considerable say in the organisation's remit and agenda. Although the colonial British government had no alternative maternity service of their own on Zanzibar, this chapter shows how anxious the colonial government was about ZMA activities and influence during the 1930s and 1940s. Struggles over ZMA control are positioned as revealing of broader anxieties over the erosion of colonial hegemony and also as demonstrative of the highly flexible way the British constructed racialised discourses about health and hygiene. Ultimately, the British rejected cooperation when it was not precisely on the terms that they wanted.

This chapter discusses the problem of racism in Barbados and the role played by it in nation-building. Race was the external marker of status and the internal regulator of attitudes of inferiority and superiority where white people dominated the legislative chambers and courtrooms and owned most of the land and the major businesses. Leisure spaces were segregated, access to secondary education was limited and certain shops, banks and residential people were out of bounds to black people. Racist attitudes were also institutionalised within the Colonial Civil Service and the Colonial Office and all the lineage of racism could be traced directly to slavery. For some, suffrage, democracy and self-government provided a way to create a nation out of this racially ruptured society which was finally achieved by the time of independence when the political, legal and judicial executive became pre-dominantly black.

To Huxley, evolutionary progress depended on the diversity in nature and culture – on the human heritage – on which selection worked. In the evolution of culture, this selection should take place consciously: idea systems should coincide with the scientific knowledge about the natural and the cultural world. His work for the Colonial Service and later for UNESCO on education in British and other parts of Africa led him to the realization that this continent possessed potential for development that had been spoilt by other world regions. Africa became the topos of his increasingly ecologically formulated evolutionary humanist utopia. It was also the region in which he promoted conservation most strongly and could witness the institutionalization of many natural parks. Huxley knew those who pioneered the science of ecology from the first decade of the twentieth century, and he became one of its most important proponents. For Huxley, like for some of his friends such as Lancelot Hogben and H. G. Wells, ecology was social and psychological as well as biological. In the form of a planned or applied ecology it referred to Huxley’s longstanding dream of conscious development – trusteeship –of the global natural, cultural, and psychological environments.