Local imperatives and imperial policy: The sources of Lord Carnarvon's South African Confederation policy
Date
1986-08
Authors
Cope, Richard
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Abstract
In February 1876 the General Manager of the Standard Bank of South Africa
wrote that there was "a general spirit of enterprise abroad, which some
ten years ago would hardly have been considered possible in such a
country." It is a commonplace that the discovery of diamonds in 1867 set
in train an economic transformation in South Africa, but its political
effects were no less important. In the 1870s an attempt was made to
construct a 'confederation' under the British flag, which it was intended
would extend to the Zambezi in the north and to the Portuguese lines on
the east and west coasts. To those whose interests lay in the development
of a modern capitalist economy in South Africa, Boer republics and Black
polities alike were anachronistic and obstructive, and the necessity for
incorporating both into a united and efficient British dominion seemed
imperative. In an article published in 1974 Anthony Atmore and Shula Marks
argued that these "local imperatives" rather than Carnarvon's strategic
preoccupations were the crucial forces pushing in the direction of confederation.
I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere by an examination of
the relevant evidence that Carnarvon's reasons for confederation were not
strategic in nature, as Robinson and Gallagher and Goodfellow claimed,but that they were the sort of socio-economic considerations identified
by Atmore and Marks. In this article I examine the question of how imperial
policy came to correspond so closely to these 'local imperatives'.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 1986
Keywords
South Africa. History, South Africa. Politics and government