Where possible, European minorities in Africa during this century have sought to insure their favored position, especially their economic position, through political action. The trend of labor legislation in Southern Rhodesia after it became a “self-governing Colony” in 1923 is a case in point. But this was not always possible. In Northern Rhodesia, for instance, the color bar was far more difficult to introduce, especially after Lord Passfield's 1929 revival of the native paramountcy doctrine for east and central Africa. The history of the white miners' trade union is apposite.

One of the best-known incidents in the history of the Bee-Hive is the reorganisation of 1870, which enabled the Junta to put in their own nominee as editor. What has received far less attention is the way in which the process began in 1868. The first intimation of this to the Bee-Hive's readers was the report of the half-yearly shareholders' meeting held on 29 May. After Potter had again stressed the effects of “the great depression in all trades”, Troup, on behalf of the Directors, “laid a plan before the meeting, by which he thought that the paper could be more advantageously carried on in the interests of the shareholders”. No details of this plan are given in the report; but from the ensuing discussion it is clear that it involved far-reaching changes, since Connolly, Whetstone, and others objected that “any alteration in the constitution of the paper” required the sanction of a specially-convened meeting. Having secured this respite, the shareholders then adopted a resolution, moved by Hartwell, which was obviously intended to provide an alternative solution to their problems – that arrangements should immediately be made for canvassing societies and holding district meetings to advocate the taking up of shares. But this was really a forlorn hope. At the special meeting, on 17 June, the discussion mainly centred round a proposal from the floor that a small committee should be elected to protect the shareholders' interests in the “impending negotiations”. Eventually this was withdrawn, and the Directors were empowered to make “such alterations in the management and arrangements of the paper as would probably effect the object they all desired – increased circulation and influence, and the payment of a dividend on the shares”.

The English Chartists of the nineteenth century were men who lived in very modest circumstances, and their mobility, their empiricism, their lack of filing facilities, the housepride of their wives and the discontinuity of their particular organisations militated against the proper preservations of their archives. For the history of Chartism we rely upon contemporary printed sources, Home Office Papers, a handful of Collections and a few autobiographies. Thus when A.R. Schoyen set out to write Chartist Challenge, book a centred round the person of the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, he was obliged to open his Preface as follows: “The impersonal nature of most of the available materials on Julian Harney, mainly newspapers and periodicals in which he wrote, leave one with no more than conjectures about some aspects of his life.”