South Africa
Founding territorial subject of the Milner Group
Also known as: South Africa, South African
The founding territorial subject of the The Milner Group — Rhodes's home base, Milner's post-Boer-War proconsulship, and the laboratory in which the Group's doctrines of imperial governance were worked out (T&H 20).
Quigley's Framing
The Anglo-American Establishment is, in its first half, essentially a South African book: it traces how Cecil Rhodes's Cape diamond and gold fortune financed the Rhodes Trust, how the Boer War of 1899–1902 created the political opening for Milner's proconsular administration, and how Milner's 'Kindergarten' of young Oxford-trained administrators in Johannesburg became the seed of the Round Table network. The Union of South Africa, federated in 1910, is read as the prototype the Group later attempted to scale to the rest of the white-settler Empire.
Strategic Role
South Africa's strategic role in Quigley's analysis is as much intellectual as geographic. The Kindergarten — Curtis, Kerr, Brand, Hichens, and others — returned from Johannesburg to staff the original Round Table editorial board, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and eventually senior Whitehall positions. The South African experience also produced specific governance doctrines (federation, indirect rule of African populations, the use of railway and mining capital for political ends) that the Group later exported to India, Ireland, and the wider Commonwealth project.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment Quigley
Milner's Kindergarten of young Oxford-trained administrators in Johannesburg became the seed of the Round Table network.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 20 Quigley
The Union of South Africa was the prototype the Milner Group later attempted to scale to the rest of the white-settler Empire.