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BIBLIOGRAPHIE COLONIALE
stores of documentary materials available both in Britain and overseas. But with the turn of the century there came a change. The South African War and Joseph Chamberlain's imperialist propaganda intensified the interest taken in colonial affairs in England, and the subsequent development of Colonial Nationalism, leading rapidly to the acquisition of ' Dominion Status ', created a similar interest in each Dominion concerning its own ' national ' history. The results on the status and output of Colonial History were soon perceptible. Separate Chairs of Colonial and Imperial History were established at Oxford and London Universities ; an increasing body of qualified research-students began to attack the vast quarry of primary materials contained in the Public Record Office and elsewhere in England ; young but vigorous schools of history in the leading Dominion Universities turned their attention to the history of their own countries ; the official archives of the Dominions, first in Canada and then in Australia and South Africa, were examined, catalogued, and made available for students while large and invaluable selections from them were printed and published mainly at Government direction and expense ; and, while British text-books began at last to discard the habit of treating the Colonies in a single chapter appended to a history of England and to provide more or less comprehensive surveys of Imperial History as a whole, the outcome of more advanced work both in Britain and the Dominions began to appear in a fast-swelling stream of monographs and review-articles. All these developments were checked, of course, by the War, but they continued after it at an accelerated pace. The advanced point now reached is well illustrated by the most important event in British Colonial historiography since the publication of Seely's Expansion of England. Until 1929 the most complete and authoritative history of the whole Empire was to be found in the Historical Geography of the British Dominions. The eight volumes of this series, edited and iargely written by Sir Charles Lucas, were by no means more text-books and they were much valued by students at