Unfulfilled Promises and Desires: The British South Africa Company (BSAC), Settler Politics and the Development of Southern Rhodesia’s Fiscal System, 1890–1922
研究了英国南非公司在1890至1922年间如何为南罗得西亚（今津巴布韦）创建财政体系，以及该体系如何影响殖民地的政治决策，揭示了财政制度对早期行政经济和政治走向的关键作用。
This paper examines how the British South Africa Company (BSAC; the Company), the founding administrator of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, navigated the creation of a fiscal system of the colony from 1890 to 1922 and how the fiscal system shaped political decisions regarding the colony’s administrative structure. It casts light on the early efforts of the colonial state-making process under the BSAC and how it established its administrative structure. Once occupation was completed, the Company’s ability to finance the cost of governance and administration was the most critical factor facing it. Whereas earlier scholarship has discussed various aspects of Southern Rhodesia’s early economic endeavors and political evolution, this paper demonstrates the significance of the fiscal system in shaping both the economic and political trajectories of the early administration. Through analyzing the Company’s revenue collection and expenditure patterns, the paper reconstructs the contours of shifting notions of what constituted the Company’s commercial and administrative revenue. It argues that the BSAC’s fiscal and budgetary administration approach was gradual, experimental, and sometimes ad hoc, resulting in continuous conflicts between the Company administration and the settlers. The paper relies on a wide range of sources that include the BSAC annual reports, historical manuscripts, Legislative Council debates, newspapers, and other political pamphlets to unpack the tensions between the Company government and white settlers over the fiscal and administrative evolution of the colony.