ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the research setting, methods and materials, and the longitudinal scope of the book. Venturesome mining finance houses have played a major role in exploiting Central African copper resources since the early 1890s, and their role in tapping these resources has continued to be a subject of considerable interest right up to the present day. The mining finance houses, similar in structure and function, were substantial public corporations with access to money markets in the City of London – the world’s leading capital markets for mining – and attractive, therefore, to venture capital. The mining finance houses became dominant at the inception of colonial rule and, in varying forms, remained so throughout the twentieth century. Who were these financiers? What was the nature of the power they wielded? Mining and Financial Imperialism seeks to answer these questions in eight chapters by focusing on the Tanks Group of Companies, a London-based mining finance house that was responsible for the far-reaching effort to set up a European mining industry in that mineral-rich region known as the Central African Copperbelt.
