British South Africa Company
Cecil Rhodes's royal-chartered company that conquered and administered the territories that became Rhodesia
Also known as: BSAC, British South Africa Company, Chartered Company
The British South Africa Company received its Royal Charter on 29 October 1889 and operated as the corporate vehicle through which Cecil Rhodes extended British rule north of the Limpopo, eventually creating the territories that became Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe). Quigley discusses the BSAC at length in The Anglo-American Establishment, where it functions as the original corporate body of the Rhodes imperial project and as one of the principal funding networks of the Milner Group through the 1920s and 1930s.
Charter, Conquest, and the Rhodes Vision
The Royal Charter granted by Lord Salisbury's government on 29 October 1889 conferred upon Rhodes's syndicate — formally the British South Africa Company — quasi-sovereign powers north of the Transvaal: the right to negotiate treaties with African chiefs, raise a private army, mine, build railways and telegraphs, and administer territories on behalf of the Crown. Within the next decade the Company's pioneer columns occupied Mashonaland (1890), defeated the Ndebele in the Matabele Wars of 1893 and 1896, and constructed the territorial unit then named Rhodesia. The Charter was modelled — Quigley notes — on the East India Company precedent and was the institutional vehicle by which Rhodes's vision of a continuous British corridor from the Cape to Cairo could be pursued without immediate parliamentary appropriation.
The Quigley Framing: A Corporate Limb of the Group
The Anglo-American Establishment treats the BSAC as one of the original institutional limbs of the Rhodes-Milner project. The Company's Board interlocked persistently with the Rhodes Trustees, the Beit family interests, Wernher Beit, and the De Beers diamond corporation; Quigley names "Sir Otto Beit, of the Rhodes Trust, Milner Group, and British South Africa Company" as the man who in 1926 funded the RIIA's secretarial expansion (AAE 153). When the RIIA solicited corporate donations in 1929, the BSAC was on the pledging list together with "the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; the Bank of England; Barclay's Bank; Baring Brothers; the British American Tobacco Company; the British South Africa Company" (AAE 157). For Quigley, the BSAC's significance lies less in its specific extractive operations than in its role as the financial-corporate hub that linked the Group's African base of resources to its London institutional projection.
The Jameson Raid and the Second Boer War
The Company's most famous operative failure was the Jameson Raid of December 1895–January 1896, in which Dr. Leander Starr Jameson — the Company's Administrator of Rhodesia and Rhodes's intimate — led a private force of Company police across the Transvaal border in an attempt to trigger an Uitlander uprising and the absorption of the Transvaal Republic into the British orbit. The Raid failed disastrously; Rhodes was forced to resign as Prime Minister of Cape Colony; the German Kaiser's congratulatory telegram to Kruger exposed Anglo-German tensions; and the political environment that produced the Second Boer War (1899–1902) was substantially shaped by the Raid's aftermath. Quigley reads the Raid as a Group operation gone awry — the Royal Commission of 1897, with its sealed evidence and its protection of Joseph Chamberlain, was, in the Group's own retrospective view, a model of how not to conduct a covert intervention.
Administration of Rhodesia, 1890–1923
The BSAC administered Southern Rhodesia until October 1923, when after a 1922 referendum the territory was granted self-government as a British colony rather than incorporated into the Union of South Africa. Northern Rhodesia was administered by the Company until 1924, when administrative authority transferred to the Colonial Office. Throughout these decades the Company combined three roles: corporate proprietor of the mining and railway concessions, fiscal authority collecting taxes and customs revenue, and political administrator. Quigley's framing in The Anglo-American Establishment emphasises the continuity of personnel between the BSAC and the broader Group: the men who ran the Company in Salisbury rotated through the Rhodes Trust, the High Commission for South Africa, the Round Table, the Colonial Office, and the RIIA.
After Charter: The Company in the Modern Era
Upon termination of its administrative powers in 1923–1924, the BSAC retained mineral rights, the railway concessions, and a substantial share portfolio. It continued as a major mining and investment company through the twentieth century, eventually absorbed by the larger Anglo-American/De Beers complex that had grown out of the same Rhodes-Beit-Wernher network. For Quigley's purposes the BSAC's institutional life after 1923 is less significant than its role as the institutional template by which the Milner Group's South African base was transmuted, through the Rhodes Trust, into the global Anglo-imperial network of the inter-war period. The Company is one of his cleanest examples of how a chartered corporation functioned as an arm of state policy executed through private institutional channels.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 9 Quigley
British South Africa Company [as the corporate vehicle of the Rhodes project].
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 73 Quigley
He was a director of the Bank of England from 1921-1946, managing director of Baring Brothers from 1926, a director of Vickers-Armstrong from 1929, and in addition a director of many world-famous corporations.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 153 Quigley
Sir Otto Beit, of the Rhodes Trust, Milner Group, and British South Africa Company, gave £1000 for 1926 and 1927 for secretarial assistance.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 157 Quigley
Included in the group were the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; the Bank of England; Barclay's Bank; Baring Brothers; the British American Tobacco Company; the British South Africa Company.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 130 Quigley
Boer Republics (or War, 1899-1902), 57, 109, 130, 135-6, 142, 144, 146, 175, 212, 214, 481.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 581 Quigley
Beit, A., 130, 131, 133, 137, 581, 951.