Kirjahaku

This is a history of the production and marketing of diamonds from the period of the `rush' to Kimberley and the rise of De Beers to the formation of the Central Selling Organization by South African producers and London and South African merchants. Based on a wide variety of original sources from public and mining company archives, it is both a business and a political study of a South African monopoly which became an international cartel. The Diamond Ring departs from previous histories by emphasizing the key role of the merchants in financing and organizing the trade in opposition to the South African state, as each struggled to gain control of production in the 1920s and 1930s. It explains the reasons for state interest in diamond production and the eventual co-operation of politicians, officials, and diamond magnates in regulating supply and sales. It includes much new material on the ways in which the British government strengthened the hand of the Diamond Syndicate and the Diamond Corporation to maintain and extend central selling beyond South Africa to other states - Zaire, Angola, Ghana, and Sierra Leone - before independence, as the `Ring' expanded into a world-wide brokerage based in London.

Patrons, Clients, and Empire challenges the stereotypes of despotic imperial power in Asian, African, and Pacific colonies by analysing the relationship between rulers and rulers on both sides of the imperial equation. It seeks an answer to the question: how were European officials able to govern so many societies for so long? Rejecting the usual explanations of 'collaboration' and indirect rule', this study looks to pre-imperial structures in the indigenous hierarchies which supplied patrimonial models of chieftaincy for territorial government. For nawabs, chiefs, emirs, sultans, and their officials and followers there were dynastic and economic advantages in accepting the terms of European over-rule, as well as the threat of deposition. For European officials, few in numbers and with limited military and financial resources, there were ready-made systems of local government that could be co-opted, reformed, or left relatively untouched. Both sides played politics as patrons and clients within a dual system of administration based on a mixture of force and self-interest. Surveying a wide variety of cases and employing a patron-client model, this study embraces pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial politics in new states. It covers the chronology of early European dependency on local rulers; the reasons for reversal of status among chiefs and administrators; the longer period of political bargaining over access to local resources in terms of land, labour, and taxes; and the ultimate fate of indigenous rulers in the period of party politics leading to independence.