Joseph Chamberlain and the Jameson Raid: a Bibliographical Survey

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Abstract
Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903 in the Salisbury administration, remains a subject of controversy for historians largely because of his role in the Jameson Raid. Just as his contemporary protagonists and antagonists, known as Unionists and pro-Boers, marshalled official and unofficial documents to support their cases, so have historians of recent times. There is a difference, however, between the historians writing in Chamberlain's era and those whose work is of recent date. At the turn of the century historians and polemicists had to depend upon official Blue Books and popular sources, while recent historians have had access to more extensive forms of evidence, such as personal letters and memoirs, edited and unedited diaries, and unexpurgated governmental records. Access to original sources, although it has not resolved differences in interpretation, has enabled Jean van der Poel to construct a good case for Joseph Chamberlain's complicity in the Jameson Raid. Van der Poel defines complicity as Chamberlain's foreknowledge of, failure to stop, and alleged advice in favor of the Johannesburg uprising and the Rhodes-Jameson plan, which she argues were integral parts of the same master scheme that set off the Raid. Similarly, historians of the earlier period, although precluded by lack of evidence from asking all of Van der Poel's questions and although not inclined to link the Raid and uprising into a single master plan, did, with few exceptions, address themselves to the question of Chamberlain's responsibility as an accomplice of the Raid and uprising.

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