THEWHITEINVADERS
pany was conducting a highly profitable trade, primarily in India. Like the
Dutch before them, the British had no vital material interest in South
Africa beyond the peninsula. But appended to that strategic prize was a
complex, violent, and largely anarchic society scattered over a vast hinter-
land.l"
Down to the late 1860s, when South Africa's vast mineral wealth began
to be revealed, the region produced little of significance to the British
economy. Its exports included wine, which was produced in the south-
western part of the colony and did well on the British market between 1811
and 1826, when it was benefiting from a preferential tariff, but declined
after Britain reduced the preference. Wool became the mainstay of pastoral
farmers in the central and eastern part of the colony by the I 840S. Elephant
ivory and animal hides were acquired by hunters and traders in the interior.
Total exports, however, were a fraction of Britain's external trade.t?
Consequently, only a tiny proportion
of the emigrants who left the
British Isles before 1870 settled in Southern Africa; only a minute propor-
tion of British overseas investment was placed there; and the British govern-
.ment provided the colony with a minimal administrative
establishment