Wall Street, Rebels, and Rio Branco - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 143

mid tropics, and were used to operating in the rubber trade. Indeed, as Leopold's private
secretary Carton de Wiart noted in his 1901 trip to the Amazon, “there were still many
chapters that remained to be written which he [Leopold] might or might not realize in
South America.” 19 At the time, Belgian capital was ranked third in total investment in
Brazil, after that of Britain and Germany. 20
The charter company was one of the mechanisms, along with direct colonization or
military conquest, for the extension of imperial economic ambition. Charter companies
can be seen as a type of “outsourcing” of colonial management, with a subject nation
providing concessions for resources in exchange for royalties. The companies would
raise international capital from bankers, states, and royal houses and would arrange for
initial funding in the form of loans and military and diplomatic guarantees from sover-
eign nations. Among the most famous or notorious charter companies of the nineteenth
century were those initiated by King Leopold for the Congo Free State (and the largest
source of rubber outside the New World) and funded by his Banque Africaine. 21 Cecil
Rhodes's British South Africa Company had been the means of annexing the goldfields
oftheTransvaal.TheFrenchWestAfricaCompany,theBritishEastIndiaCompany,and
the Dutch East India Company were mercantile ventures that prefigured imperial territ-
orial acquisition.
The virtue of charter companies was that they served both the interests of private cap-
ital (a proven set of resources, a range of financing arrangements in both the public
and private realms) and guaranteed territorial hegemony through the long-term lease ar-
rangements with the subject state (typically twenty-five but often fifty to one hundred
years), 22 backed up by military powers of the imperial state. The advantages to the co-
lonial state were access to overseas territories and management of resources and mar-
kets without the costs, complications, and resentments of direct imperial administration.
Chartercompanieswereasortof“starter”colonialismandcouldbecomestalkinghorses
for colonial territorial annexation. Bolivia's economic and political weakness, made that
country an obvious entry point for any state with colonial ambitions in Amazonia. As
Colonel Church had wryly noted, the whole place was more or less for sale.
The mechanism of the charter company was alluring since not only did it permit
initial military security through company mercenaries, but should there be a larger men-
ace—whether political (a revolution, let's say) or military threat—the nation where the
company was incorporated could choose to intervene on the behalf of its beleaguered
citizens. A typical case was that of Panama, where in 1903 an uprising resulted in US
intervention and its annexation. Another was the invasion of the Transvaal by England
whenBritish goldminers clashed withBoerfarmers overtheir lands,triggering theFirst
BoerWar.DaCunhawastomakemuchoftheguerrillatacticsoftheBoerWaranddrew
closeanalogieswiththetriumphoftheBoersoverRhodesandBritain,emphasizinghow