The first three boxes in this section hold the material used by Lugard for reference when drafting the original manuscript of his book, papers concerned with its publication, including reviews, letters of appreciation and correspondence with publishers about reprints and an entirely new edition. For twenty-two years Lugard attempted to bring the book up to date in the light of political, economic and social developments in the British African colonies. These same three boxes therefore house his correspondence with those to whom he submitted draft revised chapters for criticism.

The remaining boxes in this section contain Lugard's redrafts of each chapter with the press cuttings and meticulously annotated blue books and other printed material used for this revision. The contents of these source material files bear numbers in Lugard's hand relating to the page numbers of his book and the order in which the sources were used on those pages. In restoring order to these files, which had become much disarranged over the years, the principle was to restore a misplaced newspaper cutting to the place appropriate to the lowest reference number on it, according to Lugard's normal practice. If the same fact was used as evidence in several places Lugard noted each place in blue or lead pencil on the cutting; in his original version of the text he had used red for his page numbers. Blue books and pamphlets which bore no marginal comments in Lugard's hand have been absorbed into the main holdings of the Bodleian Library as he himself wished.