An empire’s number of colonies shaped whether it trained administrators in native languages.

Evidence

Not merely in the obvious sense. Because, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Holland had, for all intents and purposes, only one colony, and a huge, profitable one at that, it was quite practical to train its functionaries in a (single) non-European diensttaal. Over time, special schools and faculties grew up in the metropole to prepare future functionaries linguistically. For multi-continental empires like the British, no single locally-based diensttaal would have sufficed. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 527

Related

• The scale of an empire determined whether a single administrative language was feasible (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial languages taught for administration carried revolutionary ideas that doomed empire (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial administration simply could not operate in its own imperial languages (similarity 0.80)
• Language education sowed the ideals that ended the empires that spread it (similarity 0.79)
• Empire size forced recruitment of bilingual native clerks who later became nationalists (similarity 0.79)
• Imperial schools taught the colonized the empire’s own national liberation stories (similarity 0.78)