Conflicting Interests of Trading Companies and Causes of the South African War, 1899-1902

Abstract

The author examines the economic aspects of the South African colonial exploration by the Europeans in the representation of accumulated contradictions between business organizations, which ultimately became a cause of the 1899-1902 conflict. Based on the study of Dutch East India Company’s activities in this region, as well as the specifics of the settlement establishment by the British and Boers, attention is paid to the root causes of the disharmonious economic situation of the rivalling parties, taking place before the discovery of gold deposits in the Witwatersrand (1886). The changing regional supremacy of the Cape colony and the other British possessions, as well as Boer States (the Republic of South Africa – Transvaal and the Orange Free State) has been periodized. The factors of the 1899 armed conflict have been structured to reveal the conflicting interests of trading companies which had sought to monopolize the business for extraction of valuable mineral raw materials. The author concludes that the main reason for the South African War was the desire of British trading companies to gain access to rich gold deposits in the Boer-populated Transvaal and form a single English-based state in South Africa. In order to achieve such goal, the British tried their best at delaying peace initiatives of the Boers, putting forward various contradictory demands to them, using the armies of private companies to conduct raids and sabotaging the formation of a federal state in the region. We have discovered the preposterous look of the British pretext for the outbreak of war, based on the protection of the Boer states English-speaking population interests, which had been supposed to initiate an uprising. The South African War became not only a place, where new methods of warfare were applied, and a “black hole” for the UK budgetary expenditures, but also a profitable market for new types of weapons and military equipment, which allowed their manufacturers to make considerable profits.