South Africa : leading African insurance : insurance in the nineteenth century pre-union

The Cape of Good Hope was the supply station of the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie ( VOC ), but was transferred to Britain in 1803 after the defeat of Napoleon. Between 1803 and 1806, the Cape was under the control of the Dutch government (the Batavian Government), until Britain finally conquered the colony in 1806. After 1836, the majority of the Afrikaans-speaking Boers, primarily Dutch immigrants who had been arriving since the sixteenth century, left the Cape to found their own Boer Republics further north in Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal. As early as 1842, however, the British were able to annex Natal and combine it with the Cape Colony. The arrival of the imperial banks from 1862 further consolidated British financial services and British commercial domination in the region, a fact which affected the republics in the interior negatively. 1 With the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, the economic attraction of the South African market underwent a sea change, and British institutions were well-positioned and suffi ciently capitalized to service the fi nancial requirements of the growing railway infrastructure, mining expansion, and subsequent industrial manufacturing. 2 These mineral discoveries also led to the two wars of independence between the Voortrekkers and the British Empire, the most important of which, the South African War (Boer War) of 1899–1902, secured British domination in the entire subregion, and led in 1910 to the integration of the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal into the Union of South Africa