ABSTRACT
Frederic Stow played a key part in the creation of De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., one of the earliest and most successful mining companies ever to have been formed in Africa. When it was registered in March 1888 at Kimberley in the Cape Colony, it controlled the most valuable and productive diamond mines in the world. Then the Kimberley mines produced four million carats a year. Now all the De Beers mines in Africa produce five times as much, although accounting for only 30 per cent of the world's output. During almost a century since the company was formed, it has proved the basis for an enduring monopoly of the marketing of diamonds throughout the world. Even the second largest producer, the Soviet Union, has an arrangement with De Beers over pricing and marketing. Although Stow was not to know how successful De Beers would be in controlling the world market in diamonds in the twentieth century, he was certain that the creation of a monopoly of the Kimberley mines was ‘a mining achievement…almost without parallel in the annals of mining enterprises’. 1
