Governors-General
of the Dominions

New Zealand began as a dependency of New South Wales in Australia. It transitioned to a colony in its own right, became self-governing, and finally joined Canada and the others as a Dominion.

The Dutch ruled a colony at the Cape of Good Hope for 154 years. When France invaded the Netherlands in 1795 and installed a friendly government, the Batavian Republic, the British began to take Dutch colonies, lest they should become French naval bases. After a brief occupation, 1797-1803, and its restoration as part of the Peace of Amiens (1802-1804), the British took the colony again in 1806. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), Britain gained permanent possession of the Cape.

Cape Colony became the largest unit in what later would be the Union and then the Republic of South Africa. It's capital has always been Cape Town. From Table Mountain, up above Cape Town, Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), the son of Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), the discoverer of the planet Uranus, did the first systematic astronomical survey of the southern skies. Besides the Cape, the other early British colony was the Natal, which had been founded as another Boer Republic (like those following below) in 1839, but then was annexed by Britain in 1843. Natal was relatively small, comparable in size to the Orange Free State. The principal city of Natal is Durban, which is where Mahatama Gandhi arrived in South Africa and where he practriced law until his fateful trip to Johannesburg. Cape Colony had its own elected government after 1872. The most famous Prime Minister (1890-1895) of Cape Colony was certainly Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), who made a fortune at the diamond mines and founded the diamond company De Beers, which has maintained a near monopoly (with the help, in its day, of the Soviet Union) of the international diamond market. Rhodes was responsible for the colonization of areas north and south of the Zambezi River, named Rhodesia in 1895, which became Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Rhodes Scholarships were established by him.

The "Great Trek" took Dutch settlers, the Boers ("farmers"), out of the British controlled areas of South Africa and into the hinterland where they could be free of British rule. Before long the British acquiesced to this situation and recognized the two Boer Republics that were founded, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (or the Transvaal). What soon complicated the situation greatly was the discovery of diamonds in 1866 and then gold in 1886. The British annexation of the first diamond areas in 1871 and then the flood of British and other settlers into the Boer states to exploit the diamonds and gold led to the two Boer Wars. The first maintained Boer independence, but the second destroyed it. Not without a great deal of trouble. In conventional terms, the Boers had been defeated by 1900, but the war dragged on as the Boers resorted to guerilla tactics. This was difficult to deal with, and the British paid a certain homage to it by adopting the name of the Boer units, "Commando," for their later special operations teams. Lord Kitchener (1850-1916) arrived fresh from the conquest of the Sudan (1898) and cut off Boer support by rounding up much of the population into what were named, in an ominous preview of the 20th century, "concentration camps." By thus forcefully including the Boers in South Africa, the British actually put them in position to later politically take over the country. The Boer Republics were thus the predecessors of the harsh Apartheid regime that endured until 1994.

The Union of South Africa, like Australia, was created out of previously existing states, namely the British Cape Colony and Natal, together with the Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. This came to an end in 1961 when South Africa became a Republic and left the Commonwealth, because of criticism of its racial policies.

That Ireland had a Governor-General at all, as a Dominion, was a political compromise that really pleased no one. The Irish Republican Army assassinated Michael Collins over it. The history of the office was thus brief and contentious, until Ireland declared itself a Republic. Since that was in 1938, the office seems to have been vacant for a couple of years.

Although the Irish Republic has five times the area of Northern Ireland, as of 1962 it had barely twice the population (2,960,593 to 1,384,100). The North, with a bare Protestant majority, thus was more densely populated and economically much more developed. Belfast was an industrial center comparable to the cities of Britain. At the same time, it was mainly Protestants who participated in that development, and their majority enbled them, not just to dominate, but to humiliate the Catholic minority. Since many Catholics got the idea, thanks to Marxism, that they were poor because of the political dominance of the Protestants, a "civil rights" movement in 1968 soon led to the "Troubles," which meant terrorist bombings and other violence. This spilled over into England itself. The British responded first with military occupation to protect Catholics from the Protestant police force, but then, when the Irish Republican Army turned on the British, to put down the Catholics themselves. The measures adopted included suspension of many civil rights, indefinite detentions, and I doubt we even know what all else. The Government of Northern Ireland, dominated by the Protestants, itself was suspended in 1972, but the violence continued for decades afterwards. Things have quieted down by now, but negotiations and agreements are ongoing. The welcome and surprising economic development of the Irish Republic itself since the early 1990's now illuminates the truth that the Catholics even in Northern Ireland might have taken responsibility for their own economic development in the first place. The Protestants might not have been sharing their pie, but then it was their pie. Catholics needed to get their own. It is still unclear whether everyone understands this even now.

The only sources I have found for the lists on this page have been in Wikipedia and some other webpages. Despite reading conventional histories for decades, it is only recently that such scholarship has bothered giving basic information like lists of rulers or office holders. Now, thanks to the Internet, the resources of more specialized and detailed historical material become widely available. Exit this page by closing its window. There are no off-page links here.

Copyright (c) 2007, 2016, 2017 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved