Cannadine states at the outset that he is concerned with 'the world-view and social presuppositions of those who dominated and ruled the empire', that is with men in power, 'the official mind'. He believes that in the period with which he is concerned 'British officialdom generally' was committed to conservative ideals of cherishing tradition and hierarchy throughout the empire . Allowing for a great deal of diversity among governors, members of the Indian Civil Service and of the colonial civil services that were merging into a single Colonial Service, in a general sense this is probably true. Thanks in particular to the indefatigable labours of Anthony Kirk-Greene on the Colonial Service and to numerous studies of the ICS, it seems clear that overseas administrators were overwhelmingly drawn from genteel rural or semi-rural backgrounds, if not usually from directly agrarian ones, that their views about society were likely to be conservative with a small 'c' and that they tended to vote Conservative. Such generalisations have been substantiated by sophisticated studies of the intellectual assumptions of Indian civil servants, such as those of Clive Dewey. He charts the decline by the 1870s of the utilitarian individualism and free market enthusiasms of the earlier nineteenth century and the rise in their place of an increasing commitment to Indian 'collectivities', such as village communities. The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900, intended to protect such communities from the consequences of a free market in land, was a striking example of how such beliefs could be embodied in policy-making. African administrators were also generally committed to preserving rural social structures, not only through the mechanisms of indirect rule. Many African officials tended to be suspicious of trade and urbanisation. Enthusiasts for an 'imperial mission' that included being 'a global advertisement for liberal capitalism' may not have been very numerous in either the Indian or the colonial civil services.