The Imperial British East Africa Company, with William Mackinnon as President of its Court of Directors, obtained a royal charter from Queen Victoria in September 1888. It was one of three chartered companies established with support from British governments which were reluctant to spend money in acquiring new colonial possessions in Tropical Africa, but which were equally reluctant to leave the field entirely to other European powers and therefore encouraged private enterprise to take up the task of acquiring and administering new territory in the name of the Crown. The Imperial British East Africa Company was the weakest of the three new organisations. The Royal Niger Company was based upon a well-established trading organisation on the Niger and could draw upon the profits of a nearmonopoly of trade which its charter enabled it to exercise on the lower and middle reaches of the river. The British South Africa Company had at its disposal the great wealth of the diamond magnate, Cecil Rhodes, and his associates, the prospects of further mineral riches in the territories into which it proposed to move (especially the gold fields known to exist in Mashonaland), and the manpower resources of a white frontier society in Cape Colony. By contrast, the Imperial British East Africa Company (or IBEA Co) had behind it only the uncertain commitment of a looselyorganised, and geographically-diverse, shipping and trading group whose main interests lay elsewhere than in Africa. It was also set up to acquire territory in a part of East Africa where there was no existing British enterprise, where the value of trade was small by international standards, in which the market economy was weakly developed and where future economic prospects were largely unknown. Not surprisingly, therefore, IBEA Co was also the shortest-lived of the three British chartered companies in Africa. It was in serious trouble by 1891, a mere three years after receiving its charter, and only the complexities of extricating it from the political situation it had helped to create in East Africa kept it going until 1895. By then its founder was dead – leaving behind a reputation as someone who, although acting from the best of motives, had presided over one of the more muddled and sorry episodes in British imperial history.