Alan Pim

Sir Alan William Pim (1871–1958) was a British colonial administrator, a specialist in economic and financial issues.

Early life

He was born at Foxrock into an Irish Quaker family of Monkstown, Dublin, to James Pim and his wife Elizabeth Fayle Evans, daughter of the Dublin Quaker physician John Evans (died 1873); James Howard Pim (1862–1934), accountant and art collector in South Africa, was his elder brother. He was educated at Bootham School and attended Trinity College, Dublin from 1889, and Leipzig University. He took first place in the Indian Civil Service entrance examination in 1894.

India

Pim arrived in India at the end of 1895. His first position was at Bareilly, where he was assistant magistrate and collector. In 1897 he moved to Shahjahanpur, where he had the same roles. In 1898 he had a period as private secretary to Sir James La Touche who was Lieutenant Governor of the North-Western Provinces; and then was a settlement officer. In 1898 he competed in the Kadir Cup pig-sticking event.

In the wake of the Punjab Land Alienation Act, 1900, Pim was involved as an administrator in Punjab Province. He wrote to his brother Howard, giving a rationale for government limitation of land sales. The validity of the Punjab precedent became a matter of debate in the 1930s, in Zanzibar with Frank Arthur Stockdale and Richard Rankine doubting that line as held by C. F. Strickland, and in South Africa for Howard Pim's ideas.

In 1910 Pim joined the Legislative Council of the North-Western Provinces, and in 1910 its Board of Revenue. From 1912 to 1917 he acted as a Secretary to the Government of India. He was made Divisional Commissioner, and in 1925 returned to the Board of Revenue. He acted from the end of 1928 in the United Provinces as a member of its Executive Council. Ultimately, in 1929, he was acting as a finance member of the Government of India.

Pim retired in July 1930.

Retirement activities

For the Colonial Office, Pim undertook a series of reports. It began with one on Swaziland, now Eswatini, in 1932.

In the case in 1933 of the Bechuanaland protectorate, now Botswana, Pim was following up concerns raised in the report of 1932 by Edward Samuel Bourn Tagart. Pim reported that the "Masarwa" (San peoples) had a status "which could hardly be distinguished from slavery". Josiah Wedgwood asked in the House of Commons on 10 December 1935 about the implementation of Pim's recommendations for economic support for development, and Douglas Hacking replied that some funds had been allocated to Bechuanaland. When Arthur Creech Jones raised the subject of the Masarwa in the House of Commons on 12 July 1938, Lord Stanley replied for the government. He stated that the leadership of Ngwato tribe was acting to grant equal rights, and that the League of Nations Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery had raised doubt on the description of the Masarwa status as slavery.

In parallel, and with the acknowledged help of William George Ballinger (1892–1974) and Margaret Ballinger née Hodgson, Pim was reporting on Basutoland, now Lesotho. He concluded in 1935 that erosion was the most pressing problem for the colonial administation, a view with which Jan Smuts concurred. The report completed a survey of the High Commission Territories of South Africa. This work, and the writings of Margery Perham, had an impact on public opinion, in the political climate created by the Status of the Union Act, 1934. J. B. M. Hertzog had started negotiations with J. H. Thomas in 1934 on a transfer of administrative control of the Territories to the Union of South Africa.

Pim joined the six-member Colonial Development Advisory Committee in 1935. Perham commented, of a 1936 report on taxation in Kenya,

Like all Sir Alan Pim's reports on public finance, this contains a great deal of information about the structure of government.

One recommendation was implemented that year, namely an income tax on European settlers. This report involved a visit to Kenya, with an agricultural expert. There Pim met the coffee promoter Russell Wollen. His recommendations cut across the approach to coffee as a cash crop of Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time; and in two years exports of coffee doubled. In fact issues of soil retrogression and degradation in Kenya were surfacing at the time. John Lonsdale comments that at this period "soil conservation split the official mind", between state action, and ecologically-informed development. In 1939 the soil scientists Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte were formulating the white man's burden as coming to terms with "the soil and plant world".

In July 1941 Pim spoke at a conference run in Oxford by the Fabian Colonial Bureau, on The Colonies, the War and the Future. The Bureau was an initiative of Margaret Cole, Rita Hinden and Leonard Woolf, with Hinden acting as secretary. Others involved as speakers were Arthur Creech Jones, Graham Vernon Jacks, William Miller Macmillan, Una Marson and Margaret Wrong.In October 1942 he became a founding member of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, later Oxfam, and its treasurer. Other founding members were: Henry Gillett, another Quaker in Oxford; Dick Milford the convener who became chairman and his father-in-law Nowell Smith; Gilbert Murray and his wife Mary; and Leo Liepmann [de]. Cecil Jackson-Cole became its secretary. Commenting on the Quaker milieu, including Liepmann and Jackson-Cole, Finlow gives the caveat that "Little is known about Pim's religious affiliations in his adult years".

Works

Awards and honours

Pim was made Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1918, then Companion of the Order of the Star of India in 1926, and Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1929. He was knighted as KBE in 1935.

Learned societies

In India Pim was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Punjab Historical Society. He addressed the Committee on Applied Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute on Northern Rhodesia; and acted as President of the Oxford University Anthropological Society.

Family

Pim married in 1916 Norah Gordon Scott, daughter of the late John Scott and his wife Edgeworth Leonora Hill, daughter of Frederic Hill.

Legacy

Papers by Pim are held by the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge.

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Stockwell, Sarah. "Pim, Sir Alan William (1871–1958)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/40719. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ East Africa and Rhodesia. Africana. 1958. p. 1386.
  3. ↑ "Marriages". Cork Examiner. 29 August 1859. p. 3.
  4. ↑ "John Evans". BMJ. 11 October 1873. pp. 450.2–450. doi:10.1136/bmj.2.667.450-a.
  5. ↑ University of the Witwatersrand Library (1976). The J. Howard Pim Papers. Library, University of the Witwatersrand. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-85494-403-3.
  6. ↑ The Friend. Charles Gilpin. 1861. p. 309.
  7. ↑ "Personal Paragraphs". Dublin Evening Telegraph. 22 September 1894. p. 5.
  8. ↑ North Western Provinces and Oudh Accountant General's Office (1897). History of Services of Gazetted Officers Attached to the N.W. Provinces and Oudh. Government Press. p. 172.
  9. ↑ Royal Armoured Corps Journal. 1958. p. 46.
  10. 1 2 Rich, Paul B. (March 1980). "The dilemmas of South African liberalism : white liberals, racial ideology and the politics of social control in the period of South African industrialisation, 1887 to 1943". University of Warwick. p. 98.
  11. ↑ Windel, Aaron (30 November 2021). Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain's Late Empire. University of California Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-520-38188-9.
  12. ↑ Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (99th ed.). London: Burke's Peerage Ltd. and Shaw Publishing. 1949. p. 2393.
  13. ↑ Natesan, G. A. (1936). The Indian Review. G.A. Natesan & Company. p. 120.
  14. ↑ The Spectator. Vol. 161. The Spectator. 1938. p. 199.
  15. ↑ "Bechuanaland And Basutoland - Hansard - UK Parliament". hansard.parliament.uk.
  16. ↑ "Bechuanaland (Masarwa Tribe) - Hansard - UK Parliament". hansard.parliament.uk.
  17. ↑ Gupta, P. S. (18 June 1975). Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964. Springer. p. 140 note 27. ISBN 978-1-349-02439-1.
  18. 1 2 Hoag, Colin (8 November 2022). The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy. Univ of California Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-520-38634-1.
  19. ↑ Wilson, Monica; Thompson, Leonard, eds. (1971). The Oxford History of South Africa. Vol. II: South Africa, 1870–1966. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 498–499.
  20. ↑ Constantine, Stephen (5 August 2005). The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914-1940. Routledge. p. 169. ISBN 978-1-135-78010-4.
  21. ↑ Perham, Margery (1950). Colonial Government: Annotated Reading List on British Colonial Government, with Some General and Comparative Material Upon Foreign Empires, Etc. Nuffield College. p. 26.
  22. ↑ Fage, J. D.; Oliver, Roland Anthony; Roberts, A. D. (1975). The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. p. 693. ISBN 978-0-521-22505-2.
  23. ↑ Walker, Jane (1 October 2023). Karangaita' Kenya Coffee: A Biography of Sir Russell Wollen KBE. Australian Self Publishing Group. p. 49. ISBN 978-1-923087-94-1.
  24. ↑ Duminy, James (19 October 2022). Food and Famine in Colonial Kenya. Springer Nature. pp. 128–129. ISBN 978-3-031-10964-5.
  25. ↑ Fabian Society (Great Britain) (1941). Annual Report - Fabian Society. Fabian Society. p. 14.
  26. ↑ Pugh, Patricia M. "Hinden [née Gesundheit], Rita (1909–1971)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/59962. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  27. ↑ Black, Maggie (1992). A Cause for Our Times: Oxfam - The First Fifty Years. Oxfam. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-85598-173-0.
  28. ↑ Greenwood, Ormerod (1975). Friends and Relief: A Study of Two Centuries of Quaker Activity in the Relief of Suffering Caused by War Or Natural Calamity. William Sessions Limited. p. 331. ISBN 978-0-900657-29-0.
  29. ↑ Finlow, P. C. (31 May 2018). "An investigation into the role of religion in the origins, strategic development and internationalisation processes of international non-governmental organisations". City University of London. p. 82.
  30. ↑ Pim, Alan William (1898). A Monograph on Woollen Fabrics in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. North-western Provinces and Oudh Government Press.
  31. ↑ "Bateson, Edward (BT887E)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  32. ↑ Pim, Sir Alan; Bateson, Edward (1931). Report on Russian Timber Camps. E. Benn Ltd.
  33. ↑ "Forest Slavery in Russia". Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore). 7 March 1931. p. 2.
  34. ↑ Tołczyk, Dariusz (5 September 2023). Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes Under Western Eyes. Indiana University Press. p. 91. ISBN 978-0-253-06710-4.
  35. ↑ Coates, William Peyton; Coates, Zelda Kahan (1943). A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations. Vol. 1. Lawrence & Wishart. p. 371.
  36. ↑ Pim, Sir Alan (1940). The Financial and Economic History of the African Tropical Territories. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  37. ↑ Pim, Sir Alan (1944). The Economic Development of Africa: An Addres by Sir Alan Pim, K.C.I.E., C.S.I., to the Annual Meeting of the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Society on 15th June, 1944. Anti-slavery and aborigines protection society.
  38. ↑ Tempany, H. (1947). "Review of Colonial Agricultural Production". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 17 (2): 142–144. doi:10.2307/1156865. ISSN 0001-9720.
  39. ↑ Boeke, J. H. (1947). "Review of Colonial Agricultural Production". Pacific Affairs. 20 (4): 449–450. doi:10.2307/2752558. ISSN 0030-851X.
  40. ↑ Tinley, J. M.; Pim, Alan (1947). "Review of Colonial Agricultural Production: The Contribution Made by Native Peasants and by Foreign Enterprise, Sir Alan Pim". Journal of Political Economy. 55 (5): 474–475. ISSN 0022-3808.
  41. ↑ Read, Margaret (1938). Native Standards of Living and African Culture Change: Illustrated by Examples from the Ngoni Highlands of Nyasaland. Oxford University Press. p. 7.
  42. ↑ Rivière, Peter (1 November 2007). A History of Oxford Anthropology. Berghahn Books. p. ix. ISBN 978-1-80758-846-5.
  43. ↑ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Scott, John (1841-1904)" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  44. ↑ "Pim Papers". www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk.