Records of the South African Colonization Society

Executive Committee: minutes including a report from Lady Malmesbury's Committee of Enquiry and a draft letter; Finance Committee: volume of minutes and unbound duplicate minutes; minutes of the shipping, Rhodesia, Rhodes Hostel, Transvaal, Orange River, Cape Colony and Natal subcommittees; Annual Reports: 1903-1905, 1908-1909, 1910-1912, 1913-1916, 1916-1919; volumes of correspondence.

Formerly - SOUTH AFRICAN EXPANSION COMMITTEE of the B. W. E. A., 1901 - 1902

This collection is open for consultation. Intending readers are advised to contact The Women's Library in advance of their first visit.

In the social climate of the late 1890s, when there existed a perceived problem of 'surplus' single women in Britain, several emigration schemes to lessen this number came into existence. The South African Colonisation Society was the inheritor of the South African Expansion Scheme Committee established in 1899. Its purpose had been to act as a provisional subcommittee of the United British Women's Emigration Association, its task, to expand British colonising emigration to South Africa after the Boer War. This administrative framework continued until 1901 when it became a separate committee and by 1902 it had set up it own committees on education, work in counties, drawing room meetings and a shipping sub-committee. In 1903 it became an independent body functioning under the name of the South African Colonisation Society and continued as such until after the First World War. In the immediate post-war period, it helped co-ordinate female emigration as part of the Joint Council of Women's Emigration Societies. This was to be a central body which co-ordinated women's emigration after the war and liased with the government. Full merger of the South African Colonisation Society with the two other organisations did not occur until 1919, after government pressure was applied to centralise funding of the schemes and widen the scope of their activities. The amalgamation resulted in the creation of the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women.