The Institute of Commonwealth Studies was a graduate research centre of the University of Oxford which was in existence between 1945 and 1986.
More directly it had developed out of the University’s response to a proposed expansion, to be made in the post-war years, in the training of colonial civil servants.
In 1948 both Perham and Drummond resigned and the Institute’s affairs were placed in the hands of a Committee of Management, consisting of the Beit Professor of Commonwealth History (then, of the History of the British Empire), the Registrar and the Reader in Colonial Administration, who continued to run the Institute until Bullard's appointment as Director in 1951.
It continued in existence until 1986, when it was amalgamated with the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Queen Elizabeth House to form the International Development Centre, a centre for international Development Studies.
[1] In 2005, the centre moved to Mansfield Road and became the Oxford Department of International Development.