Colonial Mining and the British Empire
The British Empire was the world’s largest single producer of gold, diamonds, copper, and tin in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. The Witwatersrand gold fields of the South African Republic and the Cape Colony, the diamond fields of Kimberley, the copper belt of Northern Rhodesia, the tin mines of Malaya, the gold and copper mines of Australia, and the gold and silver mines of British Columbia produced, between 1870 and 1914, perhaps 40 per cent of the world’s gold, 80 per cent of its diamonds, and substantial shares of its copper, tin, and coal. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, in British Imperialism: 1688–2015 (2016), treat the metropolitan control of imperial mining capital as one of the defining features of “gentlemanly capitalism.” Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback, in Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (1986), have calculated that the British mining companies were among the most profitable single categories of British overseas investment in the late nineteenth century.
Mining mattered to the British Empire for three reasons. First, the bullion flows from the gold and diamond fields were the financial foundation of the international gold standard on which the City of London’s financial primacy rested. Second, the copper, tin, and coal were the raw materials of the Second Industrial Revolution, in which the British Empire was a substantial participant. Third, the political control of the mining districts was the precondition for the military and political expansion of the empire in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The Witwatersrand Gold Fields
The 1886 discovery of the Witwatersrand gold fields in the South African Republic (the Transvaal) was the largest single mineral discovery in the history of the British Empire. Within ten years the Witwatersrand was producing more gold than any other region in the world; by 1898 it was producing perhaps 27 per cent of the world’s annual gold output. The Witwatersrand was, in the words of the leading economic historian William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “the engine room of the late-Victorian gold standard.”
The political consequences of the Witwatersrand discovery were the central preoccupation of British high politics from 1886 to 1902. The gold fields were in the Boer republic of the Transvaal, governed by Paul Kruger. The mining capital was overwhelmingly British — the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, the De Beers Consolidated Mines, the Witwatersrand Deep Mine, and dozens of smaller companies. The 1895 Jameson Raid — Leander Starr Jameson’s botched attempt to overthrow the Kruger government with a force of 600 mounted police from Bechuanaland — was the opening shot of the crisis. The 1899–1902 South African War was the resolution. As P. J. Cain has shown in Hobhouse, Chamberlain and Decolonisation: In Decline at Geneva (1994), the political capital of the mining interest in London was the precondition for the war.
The Diamond Fields of Kimberley
The 1867 discovery of diamonds at Hope Town in the Cape Colony, followed by the 1871 discovery of the Kimberley “pipe” — the volcanic neck that produced the bulk of the world’s diamonds for the next century — was the second great South African mineral discovery. The 1888 formation of the De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded by Cecil Rhodes, brought the diamond fields under single British control. De Beers became the single most profitable British mining company of the late-Victorian period, and the model for the chartered company form of British imperial expansion. The British South Africa Company, founded in 1889 with a Royal Charter, was the political instrument by which the mining interest extended British authority north of the Limpopo. Rhodes’s “Cape to Cairo” scheme was the strategic vision.
The 1888 formation of De Beers was, in the analysis of the economic historian William G. Brown, “the first multinational corporation in the modern sense.” De Beers controlled the production, sorting, marketing, and pricing of the world’s diamond supply for more than a century. The single-channel marketing system that emerged in the 1930s — under which De Beers acted as the exclusive sales agent for the Soviet, Australian, and later Canadian diamond production — was the institutional expression of the British imperial mining model.
The Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia
The Northern Rhodesian copper belt was a later discovery. The 1920s discovery of the copper ore bodies of the “copper belt” — a strip of mineralised country running through the Belgian Congo and the British territory of Northern Rhodesia — was the foundation of the Northern Rhodesian copper industry. By 1930 the Northern Rhodesian copper mines were producing perhaps 13 per cent of the world’s copper. The Roan Antelope, Mufulira, Nkana, and Nchanga mines were owned and operated by a small number of British and American companies, of which the British-registered Selection Trust and the Anglo American Corporation were the most prominent. The two were merged in 1965 as Roan Selection Trust, a few months before Zambian independence.
The Zambian copper industry was the principal source of the country’s foreign exchange from 1930 to 1970. The 1964 independence of Zambia, followed by the 1974 nationalisation of the copper mines, was the political conclusion of a process that the mining companies had long feared. The 1970s and 1980s collapse of the world copper price — the result of the discovery of large new ore bodies in Chile, Peru, and the United States — was the structural cause of the long decline of the Zambian mining industry. As Keith Sustentik and Tony Addison have shown in their work on the political economy of African mining, the Zambian case was typical: post-independence nationalisation of mining capital was followed, almost invariably, by the long-term decline of production.
The Tin Mines of Malaya and the Coal Mines of India
The Malayan tin-mining industry was, in the late-Victorian period, the largest single producer of tin in the world. The 1895 Malayan mining permit system, which restricted Chinese and Malay participation in the tin-mining industry to a small number of permits, was the colonial legal foundation of the British and Australian mining companies’ dominance of the industry. The 1980s collapse of the tin price — the result of the development of large new tin mines in Brazil, Indonesia, and China — was the structural cause of the long decline of the Malayan tin-mining industry.
The Indian coal-mining industry was, in the late-Victorian period, the third largest in the world, after the British and the German. The 1907 Indian Mines Act, which regulated the labour conditions in the Indian coal-mining industry, was the first substantial piece of British labour legislation in India. The Act was a direct response to the 1906 explosion at the Courrières mine in France, which killed 1,099 miners, and to the rising trade-union pressure within the Indian coalfield. The Act was the work of the Liberal government of Campbell-Bannerman, and of the Viceroy, Lord Minto. It was not, in its effect, transformative. As the labour historian Ranajit Guha has shown, the Indian mines continued to rely on a substantial adivasi migrant labour force, recruited under conditions of debt-peonage that were continuous with the slavery-era plantation system.
The Decolonisation of the British Mining Industry
The decolonisation of the British mining industry was a long, slow process. The 1961 independence of Tanganyika, the 1964 independence of Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia), the 1965 Rhodesian UDI, the 1980 independence of Zimbabwe, the 1957 independence of Malaya, and the 1971 nationalisation of British Petroleum’s Iranian concession were the political markers. The economic markers were the 1970s collapse of the world price of base metals, the 1980s restructuring of the British mining companies, and the 1990s and 2000s transfer of ownership to the Chinese state, to the Indian state, and to private capital in those countries.
A Primary Source: Rhodes at Kimberley
Cecil Rhodes, in a speech at Kimberley in 1887, set out the political vision of the British South African mining interest: “We should found a system of colonies, of which the Cape Colony should be the base, and from which we should extend our influence northwards, until we reached the Nile. … The British Empire should be a great system of colonies, each contributing to the strength and prosperity of the whole. … The flag of England should fly over the whole of Africa.” The speech was the political charter of the British South Africa Company, and the strategic vision of British high imperialism in Africa.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of colonial mining has been transformed since the 1960s. The older celebratory accounts — the histories of the British mining companies, the biographies of Rhodes — have been displaced by the critical literature: Cain and Hopkins’s “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis, Davis and Huttenback’s quantification of the imperial cost-benefit, and the post-colonial economic histories. The unresolved question is whether the British mining industry was, on balance, a contributor to the long-run development of the producing regions, or an instrument of metropolitan extraction. The consensus, as the work of Kenneth Pomeranz, Branko Milanovic, and Sven Beckert has shown, is that the answer depends on the time horizon and the political standpoint chosen.