Shortly before his death in November 1893, Alexander Low Bruce had appointed two managers for his principal estates in Nyasaland. Initially, Agnes assumed oversight of the A L Bruce Trust until Bruce's heirs, David and Alexander, could take over when they came of age.
The provisions of their father's will expressed the hope on how they would run the estates:
"…in the hope and expectation that they will take an interest in the opening up of Africa to Christianity and Commerce on the lines laid down by their grandfather the late David Livingstone."[13]
In 1908, Alexander Livingstone Bruce moved to Magomero and took over the financial management of the estates. After their mother's death in 1912, and as the Magomero estate showed potential, David Livingstone Bruce and Alexander Livingstone Bruce purchased the assets of the A L Bruce Trust in 1913, paying just over £41,000 for its estates. They then incorporated A L Bruce Estates Ltd in 1913 with a share capital of £54,000, largely held by themselves and their sister Annie.[14] Alexander Low Bruce had urged his two sons to use the landholdings he had acquired for philanthropic purposes.
When Magomero was acquired, it was largely uncultivated and almost completely uninhabited following decades of conflict. The first cash crop tried at Magomero was Arabica coffee in 1895, but after poor crops and a collapse in world coffee prices in 1903, this was abandoned.[15] When Alexander Livingstone Bruce came to live in Nyasaland, the main estate crop was cotton. In 1908, 1,000 acres of a hardy variety of Upland cotton called Nyasaland Upland was planted at Magomero; this was increased to 5,000 acres by 1914. The cultivation of cotton is highly labour intensive and remains so throughout its five to six month growing season. To ensure that sufficient workers were available, estate owners exploited the obligations of a labour tenancy system called thangata, in which African tenants paid for their occupancy on European-owned estates in work, rather than a traditional rent payment.[16][17] Alexander Livingstone Bruce was said to have pioneered the thangata system, and once Magomero started to grow cotton, Bruce, who lived in Nyasaland and had control of the estate operations, instructed his manager to exploit thangata rigorously. When cotton growing started, the Bruce estates increased the labour demand to four or five months a year, mainly in the growing season, which left tenants little time to grow their food.[18]
A Legislative Council was formed in 1907 to advise the Governor of Nyasaland on legislation. Initially, this consisted solely of colonial officials, but from 1909 a minority of nominated "non-official" members was added. Bruce became a provisional non-official member of the Nyasaland Legislative Council in May 1908, and later a full member.[19] He remained as a long-serving member of the Legislative Council and represented the interests of the large estates.[18]
With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Bruce was appointed second-in-command of the Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve.[8] He later held a lieutenant's commission in the King's African Rifles during the First World War and was involved in the battle of Karonga in 1915.[18] He was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917, and was a promoted to captain and later major in the King's African Rifles and awarded the Military Cross in 1918.[20][21] Badly injured in the war, Bruce was later described as only able to walk with the aid of sticks.[9]
John Chilembwe was the pastor of an independent, African-led Baptist church that rejected control by European missionaries. Chilembwe sought social, economic and political advancement for Africans, and his frustration at their being denied political or economic enfranchisement, as well as anger over African casualties in the First World War moved him to change his tactics from peaceful protest to violent resistance in 1915.[22] At the time of the uprising, Alexander Livingstone Bruce was serving with the King's African Rifles and was based at Karonga, but he returned to the south of Nyasaland in its aftermath and took part in the later phases of its suppression.[23] Chilembwe's mission was close to Magomero, and he provoked confrontation with the estate's owner and its manager by erecting churches and schools on estate land without their permission.
Alexander Livingstone Bruce, as a director and major shareholder of A L Bruce Estates Ltd, was responsible for the company's operations in Nyasaland and its policies toward tenants. Livingstone could not have acted without Bruce's approval, and Bruce used Livingstone and other European employees to enforce his orders, tacitly approving of the often brutal methods they used to do this.[24] Bruce also believed that educated Africans had no place in colonial society, whose African members should be restricted to the status of rural peasants. He opposed African education and noted, before the outbreak of the rebellion, his personal dislike for Chilembwe as a potentially disruptive educated African. He considered Chilembwe's churches as centres for agitation, and that by building them on the estates themselves, Chilembwe was making a claim to part of its land and threatening its profits. Bruce (who had absolute control over estate policy) ordered his manager, William Jervis Livingstone, to destroy the schools and churches that Chilembwe had built on his estate. As a result, it was Livingstone rather than Bruce that became the focus for Chilembwe's grievances, resulting in his being specifically targeted during the uprising.[25][26] Alexander Livingstone Bruce, as a director and major shareholder of A L Bruce Estates Ltd, had complete charge of the company's operations in Nyasaland and its policies toward tenants.
In the Legislative Council, Alexander Livingstone Bruce noted that most of those who took part in the Chilembwe rising were mission educated, and he advocated the closure of all the schools in Nyasaland that had African teachers.[27] During the official enquiry into Chilembwe's uprising, held in June 1915, other landowners gave evidence placing blame on the missionaries, without distinguishing between European-led and independent missions. European missionaries, in contrast, emphasised the purported dangers posed by African-led churches outside of European supervision, such as Chilembwe's. The official enquiry's conclusion blamed Chilembwe for his mixture of political and religious teaching, but also the unsatisfactory conditions on the Bruce Estates and its unduly harsh regime of William Jervis Livingstone.[28] Alexander Livingstone Bruce escaped censure, although the local Resident told the official enquiry considering the revolt that the conditions imposed on the A L Bruce Estates were illegal and oppressive.[29]
William Jervis Livingstone was killed because of the severity of the A L Bruce Estates management and policies which he was ordered to enforce. Following the uprising, the protectorate government tried to replace thangata with cash rents. However, Alexander Livingstone Bruce led estate owners in protesting the reform, threatening massive evictions if this change were implemented. The government backed down thangata remained.[30] Even after Livingstone's killing, the work obligations on the A L Bruce Estates was little modified, sometimes amounting to six months a year.[31]
A L Bruce Estates Ltd was under-capitalised throughout its existence and almost never made a profit except immediately after the First World War. After 1925, the company never again made a trading profit, and over the following 15 years, its cumulative deficit rose to over £72,000, which Alexander Livingstone Bruce paid for using his own money. Although other owners largely gave up on attempting to manage inherently unprofitable estates, Bruce stubbornly persisted.[32]
In the 1930s, Livingstone Bruce hatched a new scheme to reverse the fortunes of his enterprise, through his new manager, Captain Kincaid-Smith, who negotiated a contract to supply tobacco grown at Magomero to West Africa. In order to fulfil the contract, Kincaid-Smith resorted to preventing tenants from growing food crops and expelling those who failed to meet their quotas, both of which constituted illegal actions, as well as underpaying them for the tobacco grown.[33] All of this was reminiscent of William Jervis Livingstone and, as was the case with in 1915 with Livingstone, Kincaid-Smith paid the price of following Bruce's instructions while Bruce escaped official censure. Rather than allow Kincaid-Smith to provoke an outright revolt, the Nyasaland government ordered his expulsion from Nyasaland in 1939.[34]
Alexander Livingstone Bruce was reported as living permanently in Edinburgh in 1940, having left Nyasaland and retired, although the date on which he finally departed is uncertain. After the departure of Kincaid-Smith, Bruce gave up his attempts to manage its estates actively, and by 1948 they were described as having many tenants who produced all its crops, with the owner essentially functioning as their broker rather than their direct supervisor.
In 1945, Bruce announced that A L Bruce Estates Ltd wished to sell Magomero. A government survey of the estate showed that the land had been badly managed, deforested, and thoroughly degraded, that its soil had lost fertility. Nevertheless, the Governor felt it was necessary to buy the land. Bruce wanted a figure that would wipe-out its accumulated losses since 1925, but the Governor considered this asking price to be far too much and promptly ended negotiations. In 1947 the company provisionally agreed to sell Magomero to a private buyer at a price of £80,000. However, this sale fell through, leaving Bruce feeling outraged.[35]
A L Bruce Estates Ltd made incured substantial losses in 1948 and 1949, and by the end of that decade was virtually insolvent. However, the government's need for land for re-settlement after the 1949 famine caused it to restart negotiations with Bruce. Some of the estate was sold to private buyers, but around 75,000 acres was bought by the government in 1952, much of which was of poor quality. These land sales made good the past deficits, and before he died in 1954, Alexander Livingstone Bruce saw the completion of the sale of the estate his father had acquired almost 60 years before. Although Alexander's daughter, Diana Livingstone Bruce, opposed the liquidation of the company and prolonged the process for five years in disputes with other shareholders, the company was wound-up as a solvent entity in 1959.[36]