British South Africa Company

   A venture controlled by Cecil Rhodes and chartered by Lord Salisbury ’ s Conservative government in 1889. Rhodes’ aim was to take control of a large expanse of African territory up to and including the area of the Zambezi, largely for mineral exploration. The government’s aim was to place the area under British suzerainty, excluding such competitors as the Germans and the Portuguese, without incurring the costs of ruling it or the need to ask Parliament for money. The British South Africa Company was one of a number of such chartered companies - companies holding semi-sovereign power over a territory - created in the final two decades of the nineteenth century for similar reasons, other examples being the Royal Niger Company and the Imperial British East Africa Company. Rhodes’s South Africa Company became the best-known, and certainly the most notorious, nineteenthcentury chartered company, although it never made the fortune anticipated by its shareholders.

   Advocates of chartered companies looked back to the conquest of India by the East India Company; anti-imperialists often drew a similar parallel. It was in deference to Victorian opinion that the company’s charter promised free trade and the abolition of slavery within its territories. The British South Africa Company took over the so-called Rudd concession, a mining concession obtained from the Matabele (or Ndebele) king Lobengula under arguably fraudulent terms, as its main asset. It was under the auspices of the company that the Rhodesian “pioneer column” moved into what became Rhodesia in 1890, establishing Fort Salisbury (now Harare.) As formally a sovereign power in its own right, the British South Africa Company had its own armed force, the British South Africa Company Police. The Company’s Police fought and won, with support from other British forces, the Matabele Wars of 1893 and 1896 against the forces of Lobengula, who had rapidly come to regret his concession. They were also used by L. S. Jameson, a prominent associate of Rhodes, in his abortive 1896 Jameson Raid. Although the company had a great deal to do with the expansion of British power into southern and central Africa - Rhodes’ “great dream of the north” - and with subsequent “Cape to Cairo” schemes, it rapidly became unpopular with the settlers living under its rule. Its shares oscillated wildly on the London exchange, leading to justified charges that they were being manipulated and giving a fillip to the credibility of theories of capitalist imperialism, but it did not pay a dividend until 1924, the year after the white settlers of Rhodesia had been granted responsible government and the company’s rule terminated.

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   FURTHER READING:

    Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. New York: Avon Books, 1992;

    Rotberg, Robert. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988;

    Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. The Randlaords. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

   MARK F. PROUDMAN