Pre-Union colonial economy, the mineral revolution and the South African War¶
How did the colonial Cape and Natal economies, the mineral revolution, imperial policy and the Anglo-Boer War shape the later racial economy?
Works engaging the debate: 25
Positions¶
- Cape stagnation vs dynamism before minerals
- Imperial factor as restraint vs facilitator of proletarianisation
- Economic-imperialist vs multicausal origins of the war
- Compounds as theft control vs labour control
Evidence base¶
The debate rests on the printed output of the colonial state rather than on firm-level or microdata. The Cape Blue Books (1855-1885) and Statistical Registers (1886-1905), with their trade tables, civil commissioners' reports and revenue returns, underpin the work on the pre-mineral and early mineral Cape (Mabin (1984)) (Mabin (1986a)) (Houghton and Dagut (1972)). Mabin's study of Port Elizabeth turns these into port shares of imports and exports and shows that diamonds overtook wool in export value in 1878 (Mabin (1986a)). The Cape censuses of 1865, 1875, 1891 and 1904 supply population and occupational counts (Mabin (1984)) (Mabin (1986b)). Simkins and van Heyningen apply indirect demographic estimation to the 1891 and 1904 censuses and the 1895-1903 birth and death registration reports. From these they produce life tables for six groups, finding a fifteen-year white/non-white gap in life expectancy and about 39 per cent of white growth from net immigration (Simkins and Van Heyningen (1989)). De Zwart's real-wage series is the only econometric contribution. It is built from VOC muster rolls, VOC price documents, Western Cape Archives accounts, the Blue Books CO 53/72-88 (1837-1854) and the Commercial Advertiser, deflated by an Allen subsistence basket and tested with breakpoint regressions (De Zwart (2012)). For Natal, Harries combines Natal Blue Book acreage and price series, Secretary for Native Affairs files, Colonial Office CO 179 despatches, Protector of Immigrants returns and Portuguese archives (Harries (1987)). A smaller group of works uses business archives: Standard Bank inspection reports and general managers' letters (Mabin (1984)) (Mabin (1986a)) (Mabin (1986b)), De Beers and Kimberley Central minute books in the Smalberger papers (Mabin (1986b)), and Eckstein/Corner House correspondence (Van-Helten (1980)) (Mabin (1984)).
For the war and reconstruction, the evidence is mostly commission material. This includes the Transvaal Labour Commission 1903, the Transvaal Administration Reports 1902, SANAC 1903-05 and the 1904 Census of British South Africa, which the Houghton readers excerpt along with Union Statistics gold and revenue tables (Houghton and Dagut (n.d.)) (Houghton and Dagut (1972)). SANAC is also mined by Olivier (1929) and Brookes (1924). Witwatersrand technical and output series come from Chamber of Mines annual reports and Government Mining Engineer reports (Pogue (2006)). Frankel's return-on-capital and ore-grade tables are the recurring secondary dataset (Trapido (1970)) (Van-Helten (1980)) (De Kiewiet (1941)). A large share of the literature argues instead from quoted elite statements, statutes and travellers' testimony with illustrative or unsourced figures (Van Schoor (1986)) (Olivier (1929)) (Indicus (1909)) (Johnston (1899)) (Theal (1905)) (Walton and Hofmeyr (1912)). Cope's critique of the imperial factor rests on close reading of Carnarvon, Froude, Wolseley and Fairfield in CO 879 and the Carnarvon Papers (Cope (1989)).
Contested evidence¶
On Cape stagnation versus dynamism, the sides use different units of measurement. De Zwart's Cape Town European urban wage series shows VOC stagnation, a rise after 1795 and no welfare take-off after 1870 (De Zwart (2012)). Houghton and Mabin instead read aggregate Blue Book trade, wool exports and bank reports. Houghton finds a diverse, not uniformly depressed 1860s (Houghton and Dagut (1972)). Mabin treats the recessions of the 1860s and 1880s as the generators of the northward redirection of capital and of the mineral search (Mabin (1984)). A wage series covering a thin, mostly white urban workforce and colony-wide trade aggregates cannot directly adjudicate each other. Simkins adds evidence of agricultural crisis from the mid-1890s, but it is illustrative (Simkins and Van Heyningen (1989)).
On the imperial factor, the dispute is partly about which documents count. De Kiewiet's liberal reading draws on commission findings (De Kiewiet (1941)). Cope reads private Colonial Office minutes and agents' letters as evidence that confederation aimed at white security and free wage labour (Cope (1989)). Van Schoor reaches a similar conclusion from secondary quotations of Rhodes, Shepstone and Milner (Van Schoor (1986)). Harries complicates both positions with fiscal evidence: Natal protected reserves because hut tax was a large share of revenue, so restraint arose from revenue dependence rather than philanthropy (Harries (1987)).
On compounds, Houghton's editors accept the theft-control explanation on the strength of company-friendly accounts (Matthews, Reunert) (Houghton and Dagut (1972)). Mabin reads De Beers minutes, inspectors' reports and the 1888 commission as showing labour control after the 1883-84 strikes (Mabin (1986b)) (Mabin (1984)). Trapido asserts labour control via Blainey (Trapido (1970)). Neither side presents compound population, desertion or theft series.
On the war, no evidence ledger offers systematic evidence. Van-Helten links the conflict to the gold standard using a few Eckstein letters and de Cecco (Van-Helten (1980)). Trapido follows Blainey's deep-level cost argument (Trapido (1970)). Contemporary commentators rely on hearsay (Indicus (1909)).
On mine labour, the 1902 Mines Department tables are read as showing that higher wages raised supply (Houghton and Dagut (n.d.)). Olivier uses the same SANAC supply-demand estimates to argue the shortage was manufactured by demand (Olivier (1929)). The claim that African wages were static for decades is asserted (Trapido (1970)) or rests on van der Horst's single £3 per month figure (Van Schoor (1986)).
Underused and missing sources¶
Several sources that could settle these points are named in the evidence ledgers but rarely used systematically. Chamber of Mines and WNLA recruiting, wage and compound records would test the wage-stagnation and labour-supply claims (Trapido (1970)) (Olivier (1929)) (Houghton and Dagut (n.d.)). De Beers employment, compound and theft records would test the compound debate (Mabin (1986b)). Natal plantation payrolls and sugar company books would measure migrant and Indian labour shares (Harries (1987)). Share registers, deeds registry and bank balance sheets would allow capital-flow estimates (Mabin (1984)) (Van-Helten (1980)). Magistrates' case registers for Masters and Servants and evictions would show how farmers used the local state (Morrell (1990)). Agricultural census data on tenancy and mechanisation would test agrarian transition claims (Keegan (1989)). Cause-of-death registers by race and district would explain mortality gaps (Simkins and Van Heyningen (1989)). Coloured and rural wage observations would extend de Zwart's series (De Zwart (2012)). The Convention's unpublished book of figures would bear on the economics of Union (Walton and Hofmeyr (1912)).
Strength of key claims¶
| Basis | Share of key claims |
|---|---|
| Systematic data | 9% |
| Partial data | 50% |
| Illustrative or anecdotal | 25% |
| Asserted | 16% |
Comparative figures for all debates are on the Literature overview.
Best-evidenced works¶
De Zwart (2012), Simkins and Van Heyningen (1989), Mabin (1984), Harries (1987), Mabin (1986b), Mabin (1986a)
Most-used primary sources¶
Holdings are matched by machine against the archive's file manifest; a dash means no match was found, not that the project certainly lacks the source.
Works and their positions¶
| Work | Position |
|---|---|
| Brookes (1924) | Rejects both identity and subordination. Advocates differentiation, with Shepstone as its first exponent, and claims this is the policy that history supports. |
| Brookes (1924) | Condemns the recruitment of African labour for diamonds and gold as driven by greed for wealth and as demoralising. Favours gradual replacement of black by white labour on the mines, a vertical colour bar, and Africans as peasants. |
| Brookes (1924) | Credits the permanent Cape administrators (Brownlee, Blyth, Elliott, Stanford) rather than Rhodes. |
| Cope (1989) | Sides with revisionists (Atmore and Marks, Etherington, Goodfellow). The imperial factor in the 1870s facilitated rather than restrained proletarianisation and white supremacy, although the earlier Glenelg-era liberal reading was valid for its own period. |
| Cope (1989) | Emphasises economic development, white security and labour supply as the fundamental purposes, and treats philanthropic statements as mollifying rhetoric. |
| Cope (1989) | Holds that nineteenth-century development meant capitalist development and hence proletarianisation. De Kiewiet's regret at it while favouring development is called evasive. |
| De Kiewiet (1941) | Rejects the simple grievance narrative of the Trek and the pure capitalist-conspiracy reading of the Boer War, which he sees as caused both by gold and by Britain's search for South African unity. |
| De Kiewiet (1941) | Combines agrarian backwardness, land subdivision, the labour tenant system and competition from cheap black labour; both poor whites and poor blacks are seen as products of the same causes. |
| De Zwart (2012) | Takes a middle position: real wages were stable, not rising, in the VOC era, which does not support a dynamic eighteenth-century economy. Stable welfare at about twice subsistence is still seen as respectable given population growth. Rejects a post-1870 take-off. |
| De Zwart (2012) | Supports Brunt on the importance of early British reforms, since wages jumped after 1795. Finds the 1843 land-tenure change neither confirmed nor contradicted by wage data, and finds a limited effect of the resource windfalls on workers' real wages. |
| De Zwart (2012) | Doubts Van Duin and Ross's claim that the VOC stimulated growth, noting that production growth could have occurred despite the Company and that population growth could offset rises in per-capita income. |
| Delius and Schirmer (2012) | Rejects exclusive reliance on either; argues for environment plus path-dependent, adaptable institutions shaping rational choices. |
| Delius and Schirmer (2012) | Partly accepts the concern with security but finds the model too static and unable to explain a dynamic site like Bokoni. |
| Delius and Schirmer (2012) | Criticises both as linear or static and as neglecting economic analysis; argues people adapted identities to economic circumstances. |
| Delius and Schirmer (2012) | Argues centralisation can be necessary for order, but Bokoni shows limited decentralisation could foster accumulation, and nineteenth-century competitive centralisation was retrogressive. |
| Dubow (1986) | Holds that Martin and especially Schreuder overstate early Transkeian administrators' commitment to classic Victorian values, because they take contemporary rhetoric uncritically. What matters for him is the mythology propagated in the 1920s. |
| Harries (1987) | Rejects the liberal reading of Shepstone as principled protector of Africans. Argues that protecting the reserves and squatting served the colonial treasury's interest in African tax revenue. |
| Harries (1987) | Argues the state was neither. Its actions responded to changing local conditions and the need to develop the colony's productive resources. |
| Harries (1987) | Challenges this belief. Foreign African migrants were important, even preponderant, in establishing sugar between 1866 and 1874. |
| Harries (1987) | Challenges the orthodox view that little was produced for the market in the reserves. Argues the reserves and Crown lands were centres of market production and that the peasantry responded strongly to price signals. |
| Harries (1987) | Locates their origins in Natal and the Cape, alongside the Witwatersrand. Sees them as products of a nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse on controlling a rootless proletariat, and of capitalism's inability to dissolve pre-existing modes of production. |
| Houghton and Dagut (1972) | The editors reject this: most contemporary documents show diversity, experiment and hope. They also note recessions and that contemporaries did not view the diamond finds as an unmixed blessing. |
| Houghton and Dagut (1972) | The editors say the compound system was meant to end diamond theft and illicit buying, but in effect 'entrenched, if it did not originate' the migratory-labour pattern. |
| Houghton and Dagut (1972) | The editors say it pulled the country together into a single economy through trade, transport and labour movement, but not wholly before the Anglo-Boer War. |
| Houghton and Dagut (n.d.) | Reproduces the Indigency Commission's attribution to attitudes toward manual labour, land tenure and the African 'monopoly' of unskilled work, alongside war-related causes. |
| Houghton and Dagut (n.d.) | Supplies the Selborne Memorandum and Conacher report favouring unification, and the Transvaal Customs and Industries Commission's sceptical view of protection. |
| Indicus (1909) | Holds the Indian Government and Britain should protect Indians (e.g. by stopping emigration to Natal) and that colonists profit from wars the British taxpayer funds. |
| Johnston (1899) | Strongly pro-settler and pro-expansion. Blames Whitehall 'shilly-shally' and Lord Glenelg's frontier policy for Boer disaffection and the Trek, and criticises missionary attacks on the Boers. |
| Johnston (1899) | Asserts negro docility, an aversion to continuous agricultural labour, and a natural fitness for servitude. This is period ideology, and later scholarship treats it as a source of that ideology, not as evidence about African societies. |
| Johnston (1899) | Advocates white colonies in temperate southern Africa, with the black population confined to reserves in unhealthy lowlands and Indian immigration directed north of the Zambezi. |
| Keegan (1989) | Merchant capital was colour-blind, and racial lines came from colonial ruling classes' local accumulation and state-building. He cites Fredrickson and Thompson as exponents of the opposing frontier view. |
| Mabin (1984) | Takes the Butlin-type 'local decisions' side of the Australian debate against Fitzpatrick-style dependency. Argues that Cape merchants, farmers, banks and government, not metropolitan finance, shaped the direction of expansion, while acknowledging constraints from capital access and staple prices. |
| Mabin (1984) | Sees imperial policy as coinciding with, and sometimes opposing, local economic expansionism. Stresses that internal economic dynamics of the Cape have been neglected in this literature. |
| Mabin (1984) | Follows Blainey: discoveries were not accidental but came from prospecting intensified by depression. Rejects the De Kiewiet and Theal 'windfall' orthodoxy. |
| Mabin (1984) | Rejects Browett and De Kock. Until the early 1880s the railways aimed at pastoral hinterlands and merchant rivalries, and Kimberley became the focal point only later (1881 Act, 1885 line). |
| Mabin (1984) | Applies the Naylor argument to the Cape. Capital went to the carrying trade and to the Transvaal, not to local industry or intensification of the colony's own production. |
| Mabin (1984) | Rejects the orthodox diamond-theft explanation (Smalberger). Compounds were mainly a tool of labour control and discipline, tied to underground mining, convict labour and the 1884 strike, with whites excluded from compounding. |
| Mabin (1986a) | Argues Port Elizabeth was at least as significant a centre of 'the extension of market relationships' as Cape Town, contrary to a widely held view. Suggests Le Cordeur overestimates Cape Town's predominance. |
| Mabin (1986a) | Sides with Purkis against Browett and De Kock. Railway proposals responded chiefly to wool-trade rivalry between ports, with diamonds secondary. |
| Mabin (1986a) | Partly qualifies Purkis's view that this was the 'defeat of the merchants of the Bay'. Stresses their poor lobbying, unclear proposals and political ineptitude alongside Western and Border opposition and hostility to Sprigg's government. |
| Mabin (1986a) | Holds that Purkis underestimated the importance of the Standard Bank and other Port Elizabeth and Cape Town institutions as creditors in rural areas. |
| Mabin (1986b) | Follows Turrell against the orthodox Smalberger view that illicit diamond buying explains compounds. Stresses labour discipline, anti-desertion, an on-site labour reserve and productivity. |
| Mabin (1986b) | Disputes Worger's claim that white workers feared black workers. Argues the racial separation was not yet fixed and was imposed by the companies after the 1883-84 strikes. |
| Mabin (1986b) | Says compounds were influenced by coercive labour models elsewhere but were generated by capitalist development in South Africa rather than being typically colonial. |
| Morrell (1990) | Rejects Welsh's frontier/liberal explanation as 'off the mark'. Stresses continuities in white views of Zulus and the role of labour-hungry farmers, alongside Zulu resistance shaping settler ethnic perceptions. |
| Nattrass (2006) | Endorses Feinstein's use of Domar's abundant land and scarce labour framework. Racial coercion was a product of South Africa's specific colonial settlement history; tsarist Russia used class-based oppression instead. |
| Olivier (1929) | Favours the Cape and Colonial Office liberal tradition against the Afrikander and Northern Provinces approach. He is critical of Hertzog's pact between the Nationalists and white Labour. |
| Pogue (2006) | Stresses that cyanide's eventual dominance was uncertain at the time and warns against retrospective determinism. |
| Simkins and Van Heyningen (1989) | Broadly accepts these accounts. Sees the Cape as commercially prosperous but failing to build independent sources of wealth, and increasingly dependent on the Transvaal. |
| Theal (1905) | Strongly pro-settler: blames the London Missionary Society, Dr Philip and Lord Glenelg for frontier disorder and for provoking the Trek, and dismisses missionary charges against the Boers as largely unfounded. |
| Theal (1905) | Calls the 1658 introduction of slaves a 'great mistake' that fixed the colony's character and made manual labour seem degrading, while describing slavery as light and the freed slaves and Hottentots as idle or improvident; this is an early paternalist-racial account. |
| Theal (1905) | Tries to balance the Transvaal and British cases in the supplementary chapter, but stresses Boer attachment to independence and that the burghers' militarisation followed the Jameson Raid; regrets the war. |
| Trapido (1970) | Following Blainey, he is convinced that the need to rationalise control of mine labour and cut costs was a main cause of the Raid. |
| Van Schoor (1986) | Rejects the liberal view that the North imposed the colour bar on the Cape. Claims the Cape laid its military and economic foundations, and that the so-called Boer native policy was really British. |
| Van-Helten (1980) | Rejects Kubicek's view that the Rand was shaped by 'clashing priorities' among Afrikaner nationalism, British imperialism and international capitalism. Argues the mining-imperialism relationship is more complex and must include gold in the international economy and French and German bank investment. |
| Van-Helten (1980) | Rejects Kubicek's explanations (political climate, self-defeating competition, Randlord notoriety). Attributes the decline to low returns and a structural crisis of falling ore grades. |
| Walton and Hofmeyr (1912) | Walton, a committed unificationist, argues that union was the only solution to the customs, railway and financial rivalries and that federation had already failed. He records that the Natal federalists lost the vote and then tried to win 'practical federation under a nominal union' through provincial powers. |
| Walton and Hofmeyr (1912) | The account shows the Convention choosing white political unity over a non-racial franchise. The Cape vote was safeguarded by a two-thirds entrenchment, but non-whites were barred from Parliament and a uniform franchise was shelved. Walton presents this as a necessary compromise, noting that the right to sit 'had never been exercised'. |
| Walton and Hofmeyr (1912) | The Convention sided with the inland (Transvaal and Free State) view that railways should be run at cost and not as a taxing department. Walton reports this as a decision that was considered experimental. |
| Walton and Hofmeyr (1912) | Walton records Cape and Natal fears that gold would dominate Union, and Transvaal fears of exploitation. He treats Transvaal financial strength and its dependence on mine labour (the Portuguese treaty) as bargaining chips in the Convention. |