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Article

ʿAli Khurshid  

M. W. Daly

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Turco-Egyptian soldier and administrator, served in the Sudan as governor during the 1820s–1830s and adopted policies that largely set the course for the entire colonial period. Following Muhammad ʿAli’s conquest of Sinnar and Kordofan in 1820–1821, Egypt’s African empire expanded gradually over a period of sixty years. The exploitive motives of that expansion, and failure ever to extract the quantities of gold, ivory, and slaves that comprised its principal object, were reflected in attempts to administer the territories. The appointment of ʿAli Khurshid was a watershed in this process. His long period of loyal service was marked by pragmatism, a liberal and enlightened outlook, and energetic interest in developing the country.

In 1826 following military service in Greece ʿAli Khurshid was named governor of Sinnar a much larger territory of uncertain southern and eastern borders than the future province of the same name Much of the northern Sudan ...

Article

Angoulvant, Gabriel Louis  

Cyril Daddieh

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

French colonial administrator in the Ivory Coast, chronicler, governor, and deputy in the National Assembly, was born on 8 February 1872 in Longjumeau, near Paris. Not much is known about his childhood and early education. He attended the École coloniale (Colonial School) in Paris, which produced bureaucrats for service in the French empire, and earned a degree in administration. He also studied Chinese at the École des langues orientales (School of Oriental Languages) in Paris. He then embarked on a career in the colonial civil service.

Angoulvant served in several positions in Asia and Africa before he became governor of the Ivory Coast Côte d Ivoire and then governor general at different times of both French West Africa Afrique Occidentale Française AOF and French Equatorial Africa Afrique Équatoriale Française AEF He had little African experience prior to being posted to the continent Angoulvant served as resident chancellor in Tonkin vice ...

Article

Antonetti, Raphaël Valentin Marius  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2020

was born in Marseilles, France, on 12 February 1872, to Joseph Raphaël Jean-Baptiste Antonetti and Antonia Rose Joséphine Antonetti (née Magaud). Antonetti was a crucial figure in colonial French African rule from 1909 until 1934, yet no complete biography had been written about his life until over seventy years after his death. Little is available about his early years or education. He joined the French colonial administration and spent his formative years in government as an official on the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. He briefly served in 1905 in Djibouti. In 1906 he was appointed as a senior administrator of the same colony. It is unclear why Antonetti was transferred to French West Africa, but he advanced quickly and became the governor of Dahomey (modern Benin) in 1909 He held this position until ...

Article

Apion, Flavius  

Giovanni R. Ruffini

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Egyptian landowner and Roman imperial official, is the best attested member of a family of large landholders prominent in Egypt from the fifth to the seventh centuries. The Apionic estates were one of the dominant forces in the Oxyrhynchite nome or sub-province of Egypt during the Byzantine period. Its surviving papyrological documentation details the activities of these estates, their financial managers, their farmers, and other related figures. This material makes the Apionic estates, so-called “the noble house,” one of the best documented economic institutions during Roman rule in Egypt. By recent count, the published material from the Apionic archive includes nearly 275 texts covering more than 180 years, from 436 to 620/1. The Apionic estates are likely to have been the largest in the Oxyrhynchite nome.

Procopius a sixth century Byzantine historian describes Apion s role during the Roman Empire s war with Persia during the reign of Anastasius in ...

Article

Barbour‐James, John  

Jeffrey Green

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Civil servant and author born in British Guiana (now Guyana). He became postmaster at Victoria‐Belfield in the 1890s, where he organized a black self‐help group with social and agricultural ambitions. He transferred to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) Post Office in 1902. With his wife, Caroline, and five children he settled in Acton, west London. Three more children were born, but five (and their mother) were dead by 1919, and in 1920, in London, he married Edith Goring (who was born in Barbados and had taught in the Gold Coast, 1906–20).

Barbour‐James'sAgricultural and Industrial Possibilities of the Gold Coast was published in London in 1911. In 1917 he retired from the colonial postal service, and he worked with the African Progress Union from 1918 (his friend Kwamina Tandoh was president from 1924 to 1927 accompanied South African delegates to meet the Prime Minister ...

Article

Baring, Evelyn  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2015

British colonial governor in Africa, was born on 29 September 1903 in London. His father, Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), was a central figure in the British occupation and administration of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, and was sixty-two when his son was born. His mother, Katie Baring, remained a close confidante of her son until her death in 1934, eighteen years after his father passed away. The younger Lord Cromer never knew his father very well, even though his towering career as an architect of colonial policy would shape his own career. Baring attended top private primary and secondary schools, and then went on to Oxford University.

After finishing at Oxford in 1924, Baring volunteered for the Indian Civil Service, the colonial administration of India. From 1925 until 1929 he was an official in several districts of what would later become India and Pakistan ...

Article

Beckford, William  

John Gilmore

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Politician, born in Jamaica into a family of wealthy plantation owners. Sent to England in 1723, he was educated at Westminster School and Oxford. He later studied medicine at Leiden in Holland, but broke off his course there when the death of his father obliged him to return to Jamaica in 1735. When his elder brother died in 1737, he inherited most of the family properties and continued to add to them by inheritance and purchase over the next 30 years. At the time of his death he was sole owner of thirteen sugar plantations in Jamaica, together with other real estate and about 3,000 slaves.

In 1737William Beckford became a member of the Jamaican House of Assembly, but by 1744 he had left Jamaica for Britain where he settled in London as a West India merchant selling the produce of his own estates ...

Article

Blundell, Michael  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2015

colonial politician, was the son of the British lawyer Alfred Blundell and his wife Amelia Blundell (née Richardson). Born on 7 April 1907 in London in a solidly upper middle class family, Blundell received his education at the elite Wellington College secondary school from 1921 to 1925. Although Blundell's family expected him to attend Oxford University, the young man decided to follow an invitation to help out on a farm in the British colony of Kenya in 1925. He already had developed a deep interest in colonial matters. Blundell soon changed his previous ideas about Africans and their treatment by British settlers while staying at the farm of Timothy Brodhurst-Hill, an aristocratic veteran. Brodhurst-Hill beat his workers, considered African beliefs and culture as hopelessly backward, and slighted Blundell once a young British aristocrat moved to their farm. He moved in 1926 to manage another farm and ...

Article

Boateng, Paul  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Although he was considered a radical in the 1970s and 1980s, observers have described Paul Boateng as a “traditional” moderate since he took his seat in the British Parliament in 1987.

Boateng was born in Hackney, London, in 1951, to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother. When he was two, his family moved to the newly independent Ghana, where his father served as a cabinet minister. Boateng grew up in Ghana and attended the prestigious Accra Academy. When a 1966 coup placed his father in jail, he, his sister, and his mother fled to Great Britain. They settled in Hemel Hempstead, where Boateng was the only black to attend his secondary school. His peers quickly accepted him, and he became captain of the debating team. He went on to study law at Bristol University.

At a time when the British Parliament had no members ...

Article

Bruel, Georges-Gilbert  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2015

scholar and colonial official, was born on 23 May 1871 in the town of Moulins in the Allier department of France, to Léon-François Bruel, a doctor and agricultural estate owner from a well-off family, and Françoise Leyrit. Bruel attended the Lycée Théodore de Banville primary school from 1876 to 1888, but excelled only in his study of geography and history, and attended the Lycée Monge secondary school in Paris until 1892. He then took placement examinations to enter the Saint-Cyr military academy and the nearly founded École Coloniale for future colonial administrators. Bruel failed the Saint-Cyr examinations, but passed the École Colonial admissions test. He spent three years at the École Coloniale and graduated in July 1895 Even before he completed his studies Bruel demonstrated an interest in the French territories in central Africa The first article he published examined the Adamoua region of northern ...

Article

Ceesay, Matarr  

Hassoum Ceesay

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2013

district colonial chief and master farmer, was born in Njau Village, in the Upper Saloum District of present-day Gambia in 1890. His name is also spelled Sise or Sisi. He was among the few formally educated Gambian colonial chiefs, having attended the prestigious Mohammedan School in Bathurst (now Banjul) in the 1910s before working as an interpreter for the Traveling Commissioner North Bank Province. Interpreters were central to the running of the colonial machinery. As the intermediaries between the local people who could not speak English and colonial officials, they wielded influence because of their perceived proximity to the colonial powers. European officials also did not always trust the interpreters, who were occasionally sacked or jailed for suspected treachery.

Unlike the French colonizers who completely replaced local chiefs with French officials the British in West Africa administered their colonies through preexisting traditional authorities and used local customary institutions ...

Article

Clozel, Marie François-Joseph  

Cyril Daddieh

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

French military officer, colonial administrator, and governor-general, was born in Annonay, France, on 29 March 1860. Clozel completed his military service in Algeria and entered the colonial service there in 1885. He spent virtually his entire career in Africa. He had earned a degree in Arabic language from the École des Langues Orientales (School of Oriental Languages) in Paris before pursuing further studies in Islamic culture at the Faculté des Lettres in Algiers. In 1892 he joined an exploration group to Chad and the Congo. In 1894–1895 he led his own expedition to the north of Congo. He met Louis-Gustave Binger, the first governor of the Ivory Coast (1893–1895), upon his return to France.

In 1896 he was posted to the Ivory Coast as a young colonial officer and assigned to the Anyi Ndenye region where he was attacked and wounded by Anyi warriors Unlike his successor ...

Article

Colonel Tye  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The son of unknown parents, Titus Corlies was born on the farm of John Corlies, a Quaker farmer and slave owner in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. John Corlies resisted the determination of Quakers to free members' slaves. When elders of the Shrewsbury Meeting visited Corlies at his farm in 1775, he angrily refused to manumit his slaves. Titus Corlies, then about twenty years old, was listening carefully.

After Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, made his famous proclamation offering freedom to enslaved blacks who joined the British forces, Titus fled. John Corlies described the self-emancipated fugitive as “not very black near 6 feet high, had on a grey homespun coat, brown breeches, blue and white stockings”; he also noted that Titus took along a quantity of clothes. The fugitive slave perhaps joined Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment when it arrived at Staten Island, New York, in December 1776 Little ...

Article

Coppolani, Xavier  

Elizabeth Heath

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2013

French military officer and colonial official, was born 1 February 1866 in the Corsican town of Marignana, roughly 75 kilometers from the capital of Ajaccio. His parents were Domenico Coppolani and Giacinta Coppolani (née Luciani). Madame Coppolani’s belief in popular Catholicism had a deep impact on his later views on Sufi Islam, with which he found many parallels. Like many other Corsican families, the Coppolanis moved to the French colony of Algeria to make a living. Xavier Coppolani spent his first years at Marignana, but his family relocated to the Algerian town of Sidi Mérouan. Coppolani attended primary school at Sidi Mérouan, and then completed his secondary education at the port city of Constantine from 1883 to 1886.

On 1 April 1889 Coppolani became a member of the colonial administration as secretary for the Algerian town of Oued Cherg This position brought him into contact with politically influential ...

Article

Crampel, Paul  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2016

explorer and colonial official, was born in Nancy, France on 18 November 1864 the son of Charles Victor Crampel a devout Catholic tobacco inspector and Elisabeth Pierret After attending primary school in Nancy and Dordogne Crampel then attended secondary school in Périgueux and Bordeaux Since other civil servants had doubts about Crampel s father s loyalty to the French Republic due to his Catholic faith his career required Paul and the rest of the family to move frequently Like so many other young Frenchmen Crampel became interested in Africa through the work of explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza whose first two expeditions to Africa received much coverage in the French press Crampel viewed both his mother s religious zeal and the discipline he endured in secondary education as backward Rather than continue his education as his father had hoped Crampel quit the prestigious Henry IV school where he ...

Article

Delamere, Hugh Cholmondeley  

Felix Macharia Kiruthu

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

pioneer white settler in Kenya, settled in the country in 1903. At the time he first visited the country during a hunting expedition in 1897, he had inherited the family title, as Third Baron Delamere, and the family estate, bringing him a fortune at the age of seventeen. Using his family wealth, he traveled widely, visiting Corsica, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Somaliland before settling in Kenya. Benefitting from a land grant from the colonial government in Njoro, between the Mau escarpment in the west and the Aberdare Ranges in the east in 1903, he named his parcel of land the Equator Farm in 1904. In due course, he acquired additional land in the country’s Rift Valley Province, and subsequently relocated to the Soysambu Farm near Lake Elementeita in 1910 Together with the East African Syndicate Delamere owned one fifth of all the alienated land ...

Article

Dhanis, Francis  

Nathaniel Mathews

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Baron Dhanis, Belgian soldier and colonial official in the Belgian Congo, was born on 11 March 1862 to Joseph-Edmond Dhanis, the Belgian consul in London, and his Irish wife, Brigitte Maher. His parents had married in Australia, Dhanis was born in London, and when young Francis was seven or eight, his parents moved near Cardiff in Wales. Dhanis studied at Saint Joseph’s Institute before being admitted to the École Militaire in Belgium in March 1882.

After completion of military school in 1884, he volunteered for service in the Congo Free State, which King Leopold II of Belgium had established in 1885 At the Berlin Conference King Leopold had maneuvered to bring this vast region of Central Africa under the control of the Association Internationale Africaine an organization he personally controlled Leopold now needed manpower to establish military control over the vast territory Initially Dhanis conducted missions of ...

Article

Dundas, Charles  

Matthew V. Bender

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

colonial civil servant in Kenya, Tanganyika, the Bahamas, Northern Rhodesia, and Uganda, was born Charles Cecil Farquharson Dundas. The son of a lifelong British consular officer, Dundas spent little time in his native Scotland. In 1903, at the age of nineteen, he took his first post in the Hamburg office of the prominent shipping company Elder-Dempster. Five years later he entered the British colonial service and received his first posting in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya. Dundas served in various capacities in both Mombasa and Nairobi until 1914, when he took a post with Indian Army forces dispatched to invade German East Africa.

Dundas’s performance in both Nairobi and Mombasa, as well as during World War I, helped him to establish himself as a rising star in the colonial service. In 1921 he was named commissioner of the Moshi District Tanganyika Territory The posting situated in ...

Article

Éboué, Félix  

Richard A. Bradshaw

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

French colonial administrator in Ubangi-Shari and governor-general of French Equatorial Africa, was born Adolphe-Félix-Sylvestre Éboué on 26 December 1884 in Cayenne, French Guyana. The fourth of five children of Yves Urbain Éboué (1851–1898) and Aurélie Léveillé (1856–1926), his maternal and paternal great grandparents were brought as slaves from Africa in the early nineteenth century to work at Roura, close to Cayenne, but they were manumitted in 1848.

Éboué attended primary school at Cayenne, started secondary school at the College of Cayenne, and obtained a diploma to teach primary school in 1901. Governor Émile Merwart of Guyana then granted Éboué a half-scholarship that allowed him to attend the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux until 1905, after which Éboué studied at the Colonial School in Paris and graduated in 1908 Éboué was then sent to Ubangi Shari where he served off and on for twenty years Merwart the governor ...

Article

Éboué, Félix  

Richard Watts

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Félix Éboué was born in Cayenne, French Guiana. A very bright child with a nearly photographic memory, he was at the head of his primary school class. He received a French government scholarship to attend high school in Bordeaux, France, where he met René Maran, a Martinican-born Négritude writer. Éboué’s passion for learning translated into a passion for politics, as the young man aligned himself with the Socialism of Jean Jaurès, publisher of the left-wing daily, l’Humanité. Éboué finished his secondary studies in 1905 and entered the French Colonial School in 1906 at a time when the colonial vocation was not considered incompatible with socialism.

After completing his studies in 1908, Éboué turned down a coveted position as colonial administrator in Madagascar to take a similar position in the French Congo where he thought he could do more to help the people of his race He immediately ...