DIAMONDS,GOLD,AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
Kimberley was a natural precedent for the Witwatersrand. Men such as
Rhodes, Beit, and Barnato who had made fortunes in Kimberley extended
their scope to the Rand, as the Witwatersrand became known, and invested
their profits there. White workers who were redundant in Kimberley as a
result of the economies effected by consolidation brought their skills there.
Within a decade, however, immigrants from Britain and Europe and peo-
ple from the coastal colonies were flocking to the area and the Rand, with
Johannesburg at its center, had far surpassed Kimberley, to become the site
of the greatest industrial complex in Southern Africa and the largest gold-
mining operations in the world. The MacArthur-Forrest process had solved
the problem of extracting the gold from the complex conglomerate, and the
industry was committed to mining at deep levels.By 189'9, the industry, in
which £60 million had been invested, was producing 27.55 percent of the
world's output of gold, Johannesburg had 75,000 white residents, and the
gold-mining companies were employing 100,000 Africans.
On the Witwatersrand, the individual digger was soon eliminated. Cap-
ital and large-scale organization were required to extract the gold from the