Dukes was instructed in the Colonial Office position: 'colonial status is not a cause of backwardness; it is a remedy'. The Colonial Office stipulated five prerequisites for self-government: a healthy and vigorous people; adequate technical skill and knowledge; adequate production; a commodity for export; and, finally, honest and efficient administration and governance. This represented a turn away from the free trade of the nineteenth-century British Empire, as the state took on direct responsibility for economic development.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 235