“Intimate Knowledge of the Country”

Abstract

This article examines conflicts around questions of policy formulation and the intrusion of private interests in official actions which arose between factions in the early British colonial administration in the Gold Coast. The circumstances surrounding the transfer of administrative control from the Company of Merchants to the Colonial Office generated distrust and hostility between two British factions on the coast: merchants and metropolitan appointees. Mercantile resentment stemmed from fear that metropolitan control was likely to erode the gains of the previous administration and undermine their commercial interests, since newly appointed officials lacked local knowledge and had no commercial or personal ties to the Gold Coast. These circumstances provided fertile grounds for the conflicts that embroiled officials of the colonial administration from 1844. However, when allowed the opportunity to influence administrative policy, merchants adopted cordial relations with the new officials and readily offered their cooperation. This study suggests that we cannot assume that colonial administrations functioned as coherent units. Another implication is that uncritically accepting the “colonizer” and “colonized” dichotomy obscures many important differences within each category and blinds us to the important social and political implications of these internal divisions.