Essays in imperial government

It is not for us, who followed her in the Readership that Oxford created for her, to attempt an account, still less an evaluation, of Margery Perham's contribution to African studies. But for British scholars, administrators, and politicians, for more than a quarter of a century, the academic study of the problems of government in Africa has been, it is hardly too much to say, identified with her name. To the study of Africa she brought many qualities but three most notably: first, the historical scholar ship which set the contemporary problems of African government in the wider ontext of the history of British imperialism through out the world; second, the imaginative insight of a woman whose first book about Africa was a novel and who has so often brought her theme to life by the vivid handling of words; lastly, and perhaps predominantly, a profound and continued preoccupation with the moral issues in the exercise of imperial rule, sharpened by her own Christian conviction no less than her familiarity with the great debates of nineteenth century humanitarianism in Britain. She has been a pioneer, not merely in her choice of the central theme of her life's work or in the conviction that academic study could contribute to the solution of practical problems of administration and government in a continent whose features remained, for most of her earlier career, unknown outside the small circle of those who worked there, but hardly less so in tackling the delicate issues of the empirical study of governments at work.

Because of the central position which she has so long occupied it would have been possible to conceive many different books which might have been offered to her by those to whom she has taught so much. Contributions might have been sought from university teachers scattered across the world who have been, in one way or another, her students; from colonial administrators whose work has always been close to her interests and to whose training in the academic disciplines relevant to their tasks so much of her life has been devoted in the development of the Overseas Service Courses in Oxford