Britain’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who ‘forced war on the ZAR’.
From the early 1890s politics in South Africa became increasingly polarised. This trend was accentuated when the Salisbury government gained power in 1895 and Joseph Chamberlain became colonial secretary. But the roots of war went far deeper. In many ways its origins lay in the discovery of diamonds and the rapid expansion of Kimberley in the late 1860s. The Kimberley diamond fields and the Witwatersrand gold fields and the industrial mining economy acted as magnets to British investment.
Britain, however, continued to steer clear of any major political confrontation with the republican leadership of Paul Kruger. All that Britain needed was to avoid being impetuous and to await the right conditions for the balance of strength and reason to shift in its favour. Movement towards an acceptance of imperial federation would give European Africa its own admirable version of the 1867 Dominion of Canada.
