Van Vollenhoven rose to governor general without ever ruling Africans directly

Evidence

As this brief biographical sketch suggests, Van Vollenhoven’s rise in the ranks of the colonial administration had been phenomenal. Indeed, as a seasoned office administrator who had already served in West Africa under Roume, Equatorial Africa under Merlin, and Indochina under Sarraut, he represented the best of a new generation of colonial civil servants trained at the Ecole Coloniale and fully committed to the rational mise en valeur of the empire. He was also the first career colonial administrator since Ernest Roume to arrive in Dakar without any field experience in ruling Africans. Despite his impressive credentials, Van Vollenhoven had never served as a circle commandant. The new governor general would compensate for this lack of experience by bringing in lieutenant governors he trusted, and by retaining Maurice Delafosse as his political advisor. Van Vollenhoven’s appointment to Dakar coincided with a policy shift in Paris, where the new colonial minister had decided that West Africa could serve the metropole by supplying it with raw materials and foodstuffs as well as men. … To achieve this goal, he issued an impressive number of circulars reorganizing the federation’s finances and central bureaus, and specified “conditions of action” for efficient administration at the circle level. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 627

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis about Ecole Coloniale-trained career administrators embodying the civilizing mission’s new technocratic bent.
• QUESTION: Does Van Vollenhoven’s lack of circle-level field experience meaningfully shape his 1917 reversal on native policy that a later chapter examines?