Niassa Company

The Niassa Company ( Portuguese Companhia do Niassa , also Nyassa Company and Nyassa Chartered Company ) was a British colonial company in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique ). It existed from 1891 to 1929 and controlled the provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa .

history

Towards the end of the 19th century, Portuguese rule in Mozambique was threatened by Great Britain and Germany, who planned to divide the country among themselves. Portugal did not have the financial means to colonize Mozambique . In 1891 a third of the land was leased to British companies. For this purpose, the Niassa Company was founded in March 1893 ; furthermore the Mozambique Company and the Zambezi Company .

Although the Niassa Company was officially opened by the Portuguese merchant Bernard Daupais, the British and French held most of the shares. Nevertheless, she was commissioned to expand the economy in the provinces of Capo Delgado and Niassa and to secure Portuguese rule there. The Niassa Company controlled the provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa in the north of what is now Mozambique.

Nyassa Company Area Map, 1899.

In 1904, the Niassa Company founded the city of Porto Amélia (now Pemba ) in the Cabo Delgado province and made it their headquarters. The residents of the area controlled by the Niassa Company had to pay taxes so high that they were forced to work on the Company's plantations instead of growing something for themselves.

On May 28, 1914, a German banking consortium bought the London-based company on behalf of the German Reich . When the war broke out in August 1914, the company's sales documents were still in London and were confiscated by the English government as enemy property.

During the First World War , the area of the Niassa Company was occupied by German troops from German East Africa in 1917/18 .

The company had to hand over its territories to the Portuguese colonial government on October 27, 1929, as the Portuguese government had not extended the lease. It was then dissolved.

literature

Barry Neil-Tomlinson: The Nyassa Chartered Company: 1891-1929. In: The Journal of African History , Volume 18, No. 1, 1977, ISSN 0021-8537 , pp. 109-128 ( JSTOR 180419 ).

Web links

Commons : Nyassa Company - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Literature by and about Niassa Company in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Early documents and newspaper articles on the Niassa Company in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

^ Jacques Attali: Siegmund G. Warburg. The life of a great banker , Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1986, p. 95; Rolf Peter Tschapek: Building blocks of a future German Central Africa: German imperialism and the Portuguese colonies, German interest in the South African colonies of Portugal from the end of the 19th century to the First World War. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 15 and 209.

[1] Jacques Attali: Siegmund G. Warburg. The life of a great banker , Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1986, p. 95; Rolf Peter Tschapek: Building blocks of a future German Central Africa: German imperialism and the Portuguese colonies, German interest in the South African colonies of Portugal from the end of the 19th century to the First World War. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 15 and 209.