DIAMONDS. GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
interests in Southern Africa. In fact, there were class, regional, and ideolog-
ical differences among the Afrikaners. The governments of the Orange Free
State and the Cape Colony were moderating influences on the Transvaal,
where younger members of the government, including State Attorney Jan
Christian Smuts, who had been born in the Cape Colony and had had a
brilliant career at Cambridge University, were trying to purge it of its worst
abuses. Second, Chamberlain underestimated both the Transvaalers' deter-
mination to sustain their independence
and the military self-confidence
they had gained through their victories over British forces in 1881.
In 1897, Chamberlain
appointed
Sir Alfred Milner as high commis-
sioner in South Africa. Milner, a talented man who had swept the prizes as
a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and had been a senior member of the
British administration
in Egypt, had an authoritarian
personality. He be-
lieved that the ','British race" had a moral right to rule other people-
Asians, Africans, and Afrikaners. He was also keenly aware of the relative
decline of British power and the global significance of the Transvaal gold-
mining industry. From his perspective, it was his duty to check the cen-