Sir Charles Bruce (1836-1920) was a civil servant and colonial administrator who served for thirty-six years in various administrative and governing roles in Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the West Indies and Guyana. These volumes, first published in 1910, contain Bruce's discussions of the major problems of colonial administration. He provides a detailed survey of the development of national and colonial policy from 1815 to 1868 and imperial policy from 1868 to 1872, illustrating the historical context of late nineteenth-century colonial administration. Bruce then discusses in detail topics of importance to colonial administrators, including Crown law, labour and health, illustrating solutions to problems from his considerable experience. These volumes were intended as a reference work for students of colonial administration, and provide a wealth of information on the organisation and administration of British colonies in the nineteenth century. Volume 2 contains his discussion of education, communications, the fiscal system and commerce.

The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire. Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.