Forever

Jul 1871

Fifty thousand men

In May 1871 a diamond hill was found on the De Beers farm in what is now South Africa, and in July another at what became Kimberley. De Beers’s own general manager wrote in 1902 that fifty thousand men were estimated to have come in the first year, though never that many at once. Africans were among them, “thirty thousand natives annually” for seven years by another writer’s count, he said. A later historian says Cecil Rhodes made his start selling goods and services to the miners.

up to 50,000 menAn estimate reported by De Beers’s general manager in 1902, who added that the Fields never held that many at once

12 Mar 1888

Regulate the output

Rhodes and Barney Barnato ran rival companies, and Williams writes that diamond prices “had been forced down unprofitably by unobstructed competition.” After a fight for control Barnato sold to Rhodes, and De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed on 12 March 1888, four men holding all but twenty-five of its shares. One gain, De Beers’s manager wrote fourteen years later, was that output could be regulated to what the market demanded. Rhodes, he says, told shareholders he could produce twice the amount of diamonds the world required from two mines alone.

1902

The compound

By 1902 there were seventeen walled compounds on the Diamond Fields, twelve of them De Beers’s. The largest held three thousand African workers inside ten-foot iron fences, with wire netting overhead against thrown stones. Williams wrote that it had a hospital, a church and a swimming bath, and that compound companies gave food and shelter “at moderate charges deducted from their pay.” He gave the purpose as stopping diamond theft: no worker could pass the gate until his contract ended without permission, and clothes and bodies were searched on leaving.

1929

Anglo American

Ernest Oppenheimer founded Anglo American in 1917. In 1926 Anglo became a major shareholder in De Beers and he joined its board; in 1929 he became chairman. In 1932, as the Depression bit, De Beers’s own history says all of its mines closed. The company Rhodes had put together was now run by the founder of another.

1929The year Ernest Oppenheimer became chairman of De Beers, twelve years after he founded Anglo American

2006

Mostly one channel

De Beers sold rough diamonds mainly through “sightholders,” approved buyers: 125 in 2000, 93 in 2006. The Third Circuit spoke of De Beers’s “undisputed position as the dominant participant in the wholesale market for gem-quality diamonds throughout much of the twentieth century,” and American buyers alleged that it coordinated sales worldwide through deals with competitors, production limits, resale limits and marketing. The Times reported in 2000 that De Beers said it meant to move “from being custodian of the market” to “leader of the industry,” renaming its sales unit, “long called the Central Selling Organization,” the Diamond Trading Company. Its share of the market, roughly 85 percent in the early 1980s, was about two-thirds by the company’s own count in 2000.

93Sightholders, the approved wholesalers allowed to buy rough diamonds from De Beers, in 2006

2 Dec 1938

A plan for America

In September 1938, with the Depression deep and war near, Ernest Oppenheimer sent his son Harry to the Philadelphia advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. On 2 December De Beers paid $10,000 to begin a survey of some 4,100 married men and women and about 1,000 students. Fewer than two-thirds of the women owned a diamond engagement ring, and the young ones said they would rather have a car, a fur coat or a trip.

21 May 1945

A suit in New York

In 1945 the United States sued De Beers and others in New York, charging a conspiracy to restrain and monopolize trade in gem and industrial diamonds. The district court froze their property in the country; on 21 May 1945 the Supreme Court set that order aside and did not decide the charge. The Third Circuit later called De Beers “a party with a long track record of avoiding the jurisdiction of courts in the United States,” and the sources here do not show how the suit ended. Separately, in a historian’s account that rests partly on Epstein, Roosevelt sought 6.5 million carats of industrial diamonds in the war; Oppenheimer argued a U.S. surplus would unsettle the market, sold one million, and the shortage had passed by 1943.

1947

A late night in 1947

Frances Gerety, a copywriter at Ayer, was finishing a De Beers advertisement that needed a slogan. She scribbled “a diamond is forever” and went to bed; within a year it was De Beers’s official slogan. She later said that adding a line at all was her boss Gerold Lauck’s idea. De Beers’s own history calls it the greatest advertising tagline of the 20th century.

23 Jan 1955

A custom, grown

The popular version is that an advertising agency invented the diamond engagement ring, but the record is mixed. Ayer’s 1938 survey found Americans “most closely” linked diamonds with love and more than half of the women surveyed already owned such a ring, and Tiffany says it made its diamond ring a symbol of commitment in 1886. The historian Jennifer Pequignot writes that before 1939 giving one was “an unestablished practice,” yet that Ayer “managed to revive and expand” the tradition, with ads, a 27-minute film and publicity. Ayer’s own figures: a 1944 release headlined “Three Out of Four Brides Get Diamond Rings,” and 80 percent of brides in 1959, with 23 million viewers claimed for the film; how far the campaign, rather than weddings and wages, did it these sources do not settle.

23 millionAudience Ayer claimed for the film A Diamond Is Forever after it aired on television on 23 January 1955

1982

One writer’s case

In 1982 Edward Jay Epstein published The Rise and Fall of Diamonds. A reviewer summed up his case: by controlling supply, De Beers created a “diamond invention,” with Ayer’s advertising telling men a ring was proper and women never to resell it. Epstein put De Beers’s control at 50 to 60 percent of the trade against the company’s claim of 80, told of stones resold at 60 percent of wholesale, and saw a crash coming; whether it came these sources do not show. This is one named writer’s account, as a reviewer reported it.

13 Jul 2004

Two courts

In 1994 a federal grand jury in Columbus, Ohio, indicted De Beers Centenary AG for conspiring to raise industrial-diamond list prices in 1991 and 1992; General Electric, its alleged co-conspirator, was tried and acquitted. The court lacked jurisdiction over De Beers Centenary until it consented in 2004, and it then pleaded guilty, admitting agreements to raise list prices, and was sentenced to a $10 million fine. Gem diamonds went another way: American buyers sued, alleging price-fixing and monopolization; De Beers refused to appear and defaults were entered, then it sought talks and settled for $295 million with an injunction. The Third Circuit noted it “has continued to deny any wrongdoing” and upheld the settlement classes in 2011.

$10 millionFine De Beers Centenary AG was sentenced to pay after pleading guilty in 2004 to conspiring to fix the price of industrial diamonds

1998

The mines under apartheid

After apartheid, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission wrote that the mining industry, chiefly gold, “bears a great deal of moral responsibility for the migrant labour system and its associated hardships.” It said Anglo American, then a sister company of De Beers, “accepted that it could have been a better corporate citizen”: it had not built even the limited family housing the law allowed. Yet it said the submission’s “most glaring failure was to sidestep the African wage issue,” noting that real African gold-mine wages were “higher in 1915 than they were in 1970.” This volume does not single out De Beers’s diamond compounds.

5 Jul 2000

Blood diamonds

On 12 June 1998 the Security Council banned imports of Angolan diamonds not covered by the government’s certificate of origin; on 5 July 2000 it banned rough diamonds from Sierra Leone, stressing the legitimate trade’s “great economic importance for many States.” Human rights groups accused De Beers of buying illicit diamonds from rebels and rulers, the New York Times reported; it called the ties to Angolan rebels “often-denied” and said De Beers had suspended outside buying since October 1999. De Beers’s chairman said of the company’s stand on conflict diamonds that it was “the moral imperative and also the fear of what might happen to the diamond industry.” The Times gave Edward Jay Epstein’s view in its own words, that the company had in effect got the UN to police the market against cheaper stones, and quoted him only as calling it “another brilliant coup.”

2 Dec 2011

A scheme, and its critics

The Kimberley Process, launched in 2003, has member countries certify rough diamonds, defining conflict diamonds as “rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments.” Its own text says it is “convinced” that certification can seriously reduce the role of such diamonds in fuelling conflict. Global Witness, which says it helped set the scheme up, left in December 2011, accusing it of refusing to evolve and pointing to Zimbabwe’s Marange fields, where, it said, the army killed around 200 miners in 2008. That is Global Witness’s case against a scheme that describes its purpose as keeping conflict diamonds out of the legitimate trade.

7 Apr 2022

Soviet diamonds

From 1959, wrote Russell Shor, the Soviet Union sold its rough diamonds to De Beers in a “not-so-secret arrangement”; in 1990 De Beers Centenary signed a five-year exclusive deal with the Soviet diamond administration, with a $1 billion loan. By the U.S. Treasury’s count in 2022, Alrosa, the Russian state miner, was 28 percent of the world’s diamond mining. The U.S. sanctioned it on 24 February and, fully, on 7 April 2022. On 6 December 2023 the G7 leaders agreed to restrict imports of non-industrial Russian diamonds from 1 January 2024.

1969

What a mine gives a country

De Beers geologists found the Orapa pipe in Botswana in April 1967; when Debswana began in 1969 the government held 15 percent, and a minister said in 2023 that a 1975 deal made it 50-50 and that diamonds came to supply 70 percent of export earnings and half of government revenue. A minister said in 1990 that revenue rose from under 10 million pula a year at independence to over a billion. The IMF put mineral revenue at 13.3 percent of GDP in 2022, and said the economy contracted 3 percent in 2024 and would shrink about 1 percent in 2025 as diamond production fell. De Beers says that from 2025 the government’s own sales company sells 30 percent of Debswana’s output, rising to 50 percent from 2035.

14 May 2024

Anglo steps back

Anglo American has owned 85 percent of De Beers since 2012, when the Oppenheimer family sold its 40 percent; the Government of Botswana holds the other 15 percent. On 14 May 2024 Anglo said it would focus on copper, iron ore and crop nutrients, and that De Beers would be “divested or demerged.” In February 2025 it cut De Beers’s book value by $2.9 billion “given prevailing diamond market conditions.” On 20 October 2026 it said it was still working towards a deal “in a challenging market”; no sale was complete.

7 Jan 2021

Who sells

LVMH agreed in November 2019 to buy Tiffany for $135 a share, about $16.2 billion; after the two settled a lawsuit in Delaware and the price fell to $131.50, it completed on 7 January 2021. Richemont, owner of Cartier, sold €15.3 billion through its jewellery houses in a year. Signet, which called itself in 2023 “the world’s largest retailer of diamond jewelry,” ran about 2,800 stores under banners including Kay, Zales and Jared. The links to the mines are only those the records show: in 2006 Tiffany was majority owner of a De Beers sightholder, and from 2001 to 2017 LVMH and De Beers shared a jewelry company.

€15.3 billionSales of Richemont’s jewellery houses, Cartier among them, in the year to 31 March 2025

16 Aug 2018

Made in a lab

In August 2018 the Federal Trade Commission dropped “natural” from its definition of a diamond in the Jewelry Guides, because lab-created stones with the same properties “are also diamonds”; the Guides advise that a lab-grown stone be described clearly as one. That year De Beers launched Lightbox at $800 a carat, and by May 2024 it sold as low as $500. In May 2025 De Beers said it would close Lightbox, citing its “commitment to natural diamonds,” and said wholesale lab-grown prices had fallen 90 percent since 2018. Pandora said on 4 May 2021 that it would stop using mined diamonds, and the IMF listed cheaper lab-grown stones as a risk to Botswana in 2024.

$800 to $500Per-carat price of De Beers’s lab-grown Lightbox diamonds: the launch structure of 2018, and as low as by May 2024

Aug 2017

Gold

Richemont, owner of Cartier, said higher raw material costs, “notably gold,” weighed on its profit in the year to March 2025. Small-scale gold miners often use mercury to pull gold from ore: the treaty speaks of mining “in which mercury amalgamation is used to extract gold from ore.” The head of UN Environment wrote that this is the largest source of mercury emissions. The Minamata Convention, in force since August 2017, tells each party with such mining to take steps “to reduce, and where feasible eliminate” the use of mercury.