African Finances
EVEN allowing for the distractions of war, this book has appeared at a very appropriate moment. Simultaneously with the war has come a very important change in Britain's colonial financial policy, and Sir Alan Pim's survey puts this change into its context. Until yesterday the British Government dung to the principle that all colonies should be financially self-supporting and should be given assistance from the Treasury only in the event of a deficit, and then under a strict and negative super- vision. Even the Colonial Development Fund (about which more might have been said in this survey) was a somewhat grudging departure from a general rule. The recent promise of 5i million pounds annually for development and research is a new and solid contribution to the policy of trusteeship.
This book brings out the need for such assistance. It traces briefly the economic and financial history of the tropical terri- tories, British and foreign, bringing out the dangerous dependence of most of them upon one or two products and the essential part played by the development of communications. Some valuable analytic tables of revenue and trade are included. The difficulty in supplying Africa with the capital required for her general, as against her mineral, development, is well brought out. This book, though brief and mainly descriptive—it is based on the Beit Fund lectures—is the outcome not only of expert study of intractable material, but has behind it the deep practical knowledge gained by the author in his many diagnoses of the
Previous page
