Chartered companies were important tools of European colonialism, but also institutions with a political agenda of their own. In this study, we focus upon one key chartered company, the British South Africa Company, in particular the ending of its charter in 1923/24, in order to study the business diplomacy strategies employed by the company. We show how the company during the period under study moved from a reactive and defensive diplomacy strategy concerning its charter, to a proactive and transformative strategy. In this way, the company managed to renegotiate the terms under which it operated so that it eventually came to accept and even embrace the ending of chartered rule, rather than to oppose it.

Histories of the modern missionary movement frequently assert that converts were more successful missionaries than Europeans yet details of their work remain sparse. This article examines influential factors in the spread of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in two ways. It explores the complex and variable processes through life sketches of the African missionaries, Bernard Mizeki, Leonard Kamungu and Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked with the Anglican mission agencies SPG, UMCA and CMS, respectively. It identifies common elements for further scrutiny including the role of travel, translation and communication, and the development of continental centres of Christianity and the trajectories between them and local hubs of mission activity. The transnational turn of contemporary history is employed and critiqued to scrutinise the relations between the local and global in order to comprehend the appeal of Christianity in the colonial era.

In southern Africa the portal of globalization opened by finance capital towards the end of the nineteenth century frequently turned on mining speculation. A particularly notorious case was that of the Ayrshire mine in Southern Rhodesia's Lomagundi district. Touted in its heyday as the richest gold prospect in the entire southern half of the continent, the Ayrshire's corporate existence was characterized by company-mongering and market manipulation in the City of London. Few of these concerns immediately impinged on indigenous interests. As interaction between the global and the local was sporadic and contingent, local politics of dynastic accommodation only gradually gave way to global dynamics of dispossession and accumulation.