Historiographical approaches¶
What approaches should frame the historiography: structuralism vs social history from below, the cultural turn, liberal vs radical historical geography, and the role of archives?
Works engaging the debate: 17
Positions¶
- Social history from below (History Workshop)
- Structural Marxism and class analysis (Murray)
- Cultural turn vs materialist analysis
Evidence base¶
Most of this debate has been argued from secondary literature rather than primary data. Several of the seventeen works are programmatic or historiographical. Crush (1986a) lists no sources at all. Lester (2003), (Tatham (1990)) and Maylam (1995) synthesise published case studies, theses and programmatic statements. Tatham (1990) adds a handful of 1989 interviews with historians (Morris, Marks, Delius, Bonner). Crush (1984), (Hindson (1989)) and Murray (2006) are book reviews that produce no data of their own. The central theoretical exchange is also conducted almost entirely as close reading. Murray's structural-Marxist critique (Murray (1989)) works from Keegan's Rural Transformations, Beinart and Delius's Putting a Plough to the Ground, and Bradford's A Taste of Freedom. Keegan's reply (Keegan (1989)) cites his own earlier Highveld research, life stories from Facing the Storm and comparative analogies (Chile, Latin American haciendas, east-Elbian estates). Neither side presents census, farm-level or credit data. The 'from below' camp's self-assessments, (Callinicos (1990)) and Bonner (1994), rest on participant knowledge and movement and publication records: union publications, NECC resolutions, the History Workshop Triennial Report 1984-87, New Nation circulation and readership estimates and its letters page, sold-out print runs, and Open Day attendance counts. Reception is evidenced only by illustrative figures.
A minority of works carry substantial archival or statistical bases. Mabin (1984) builds descriptive tables from several series: the Cape Blue Books (1855-85) and Statistical Registers (1886-1905), the Cape censuses of 1865, 1875, 1891 and 1904, Cape Votes and Proceedings annexures and Hansard, and Standard Bank inspection reports and branch card indexes. He also uses Barlow Rand (Eckstein) correspondence, Chamber of Commerce reports and British trade series. From these he periodises boom and slump and traces capital flows northward. Pogue (2006) compiles Chamber of Mines Annual Reports for 1886-1933 (output, price, extraction-method shares, employment by race), Government Mine Engineer reports on drill use, the Low Grade Mines Commission (UG 34/1920) and Union Statistics for Fifty Years. It also draws on Technical Advisory Committee minute books. Its one claim coded as systematic is that cyanidation's share of post-amalgamation gold rose from 83% to 95% in 1892-99. Breckenridge (1995) combines several archival strands: Barlow Rand files (Evans letterbooks, directors' confidential letters, the file on paying natives in paper currency), Chamber of Mines Archive files on the gold standard and native labour, South African Mint (CAD SAM) and GNLB files, and Kemmerer-Vissering Commission evidence. He adds Union Statistics price and revenue series and four 1992 oral interviews with Mpondo and Bhaca ex-miners. Parnell and Mabin (1995) uses provincial and Union legislation from 1894-1912 and the commissions of 1902-05, the Financial Relations Commission (UG 11-1912), and SEPC Report No. 5 (UG 34-1944). Further sources are NRDC and municipal archive series for Durban and Cape Town and interviews with planners. He also uses archival legislation and his own insider experience. Pankhurst (1996) reads the Tomlinson, Godlonton and Odendaal commission reports against Namibian theses and NEPRU briefing papers.
Contested evidence¶
The structuralist versus social-history dispute turns on the same small set of texts read through incompatible definitions rather than on rival datasets. Murray (1989) reads Keegan's evidence on share-cropping, rent tenancy and labour tenancy as conflating distinct relations of production. He reads Keegan's reliance on the 1873 masters-and-servants law, 1908-14 state intervention and the 1913 Land Act as contradicting his downplaying of state coercion. He also argues that Bradford's case for a 'peasant spirit' among labour tenants rests on a single ICU organiser's recollection. Keegan (1989) answers that Morris's 1920s transition is supported only by theoretical authorities (Lenin, Hindess and Hirst, Poulantzas). Yet his own counter-chronology, in which agriculture was stunted until state-backed tractor mechanisation after 1945, is asserted without mechanisation or Land Bank figures. Tatham (1990) records that Bradford and Keegan challenged Morris 'on empirical grounds' but does not analyse that evidence.
In urban historiography the same legislative record yields different causal readings. Maylam (1995) uses the 1914 Tuberculosis and 1918 Influenza Commission reports to argue that the 'sanitation syndrome' was mostly a pretext for segregation. Parnell and Mabin (1995) instead treats anti-slum and public health law as a driver comparable to native policy, though her support is coded as resting solely on an unpublished thesis. Both cite pre-1948 council plans (the Western Areas in 1944, District Six in 1940) and Group Areas origins as evidence of continuity. However, Maylam's point that local autonomy rested on finance is conceded to rest on scattered references. Crush (1984) reinterprets Western's 100-family Mowbray interview sample and his Group Areas mapping through class rather than race, but offers no alternative data.
The cultural turn appears in Breckenridge (1995). There managers' reports of a 'metallic mystique' and a few oral testimonies are read as migrants' own valuation of gold. A materialist reading of the same Barlow Rand and Chamber of Mines correspondence, which (Lester (2003)) would defend, emphasises the owners' profit calculus at the 1931-33 devaluation. Harris (2002) contests the evidentiary premise shared by all sides. He argues that archives are a 'sliver of a sliver' skewed by State Archives Service appraisal toward white, elite experience. That critique bears on Lester (2003)'s observation that radical historical geography relied on archival rather than oral sources. Pankhurst (1996) similarly reads the Odendaal Report and second-wave Namibian research against 'resistance historiography', which in her view inferred impoverishment from state intent.
Underused and missing sources¶
Several of the debate's core empirical propositions could be tested with sources the works themselves identify but do not use. The timing of agrarian capitalism, disputed by Murray (1989) and Keegan (1989), calls for agricultural census series on tractors, tenants and farm employment, and for Land Bank and subsidy records on state credit. Hindson (1989)'s claims about African occupational mobility and the 1985-86 shift in state strategy would need census occupational tables, the Manpower Survey and labour force surveys. The continuity thesis of Maylam (1995) and the local-state argument of Parnell and Mabin (1995) need several further sources: systematic municipal budget and expenditure series by race, council minutes and town clerk files across more towns, and Group Areas Board, deeds and valuation records. The impact claims of Bonner (1994) and Callinicos (1990) lack publisher sales and print-run records, syllabus analyses and the History Workshop's own archive. Breckenridge (1995) would be strengthened by compound-level wage and deferred-pay ledgers, Mint coin-issue series, and regional price and wage data. Murray (2006) and Pogue (2006) point to sources that went unused: Chamber of Mines, WNLA and TEBA recruiting and mortality returns and Basutoland tax data, and the Corner House technical committee (RDIC, CMIC, TAC) records. Mabin (1984) notes that share registers, bank balance sheets and the deeds registry would turn anecdotal flotation evidence into estimates of capital flows.
Strength of key claims¶
| Basis | Share of key claims |
|---|---|
| Systematic data | 1% |
| Partial data | 40% |
| Illustrative or anecdotal | 28% |
| Asserted | 30% |
Comparative figures for all debates are on the Literature overview.
Best-evidenced works¶
Mabin (1984), Pogue (2006), Breckenridge (1995), Parnell and Mabin (1995), Harris (2002)
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 |
|---|---|
| Bonner (1994) | Treats the radical critique, led from England from the late 1960s, as having produced a revolution in historical writing. The Workshop is presented as the local home of that revolution. |
| Bonner (1994) | Favours social history, with its attention to human agency and consciousness, over the earlier instrumentalist, structuralist Marxism, in which agency 'barely figured'. |
| Bonner (1994) | Acknowledges that activists sometimes tried to dictate research priorities for 'the struggle', but judges that the benefits far outweighed the losses. |
| Breckenridge (1995) | Draws on Appadurai, Ferguson and the Comaroffs but insists that class politics of production and the state must be integrated. He adds gold (imali bomvu) as a third term alongside cattle and paper money in the anthropology of commodities. |
| Callinicos (1990) | Describes both strands and notes each plays down the other's emphasis. Her own sympathy is with radical social history combining structure and experience, but she accepts both have gaps. |
| Callinicos (1990) | Presents both sides; argues professional historians should be in touch with and organisationally linked to their audience. |
| Crush (1984) | Argues for a 'geography from below' attentive to struggle and the everyday responses of the dominated. |
| Crush (1986a) | Firmly on the revisionist side. It rejects the Eurocentric, 'antiseptic' tradition and calls for a historical-materialist, class-based geography of racial capitalism. |
| Crush (1986a) | Rejects an undifferentiated 'African contribution' approach. It argues for a contextual analysis of class and racial conflict and of the interaction of pre-capitalist societies with capitalist production. |
| Harris (2002) | Rejects the view of archives as mirrors of reality and of archivists as impartial custodians. Argues post-apartheid transformation discourse remains positivist. |
| Harris (2002) | Supports the shift to macro-appraisal and archivists as active documenters, but calls for more attention to orality and indigenous epistemologies. |
| Hindson (1989) | Agrees that structural analysis matters but says Wolpe swings too far into structural determinism, for example in explaining the turn to armed struggle. |
| Keegan (1989) | Defends rural historians against Murray's blanket critique. He insists revisionist work retains concern with structure and process, while granting that rural conceptualisation needs re-theorising. |
| Lester (2003) | Sides with the radical critique of liberal descriptive work as complicit in white privilege, while stressing that the radical tradition's materialism and empiricism remain valuable. |
| Lester (2003) | Rejects the delinkage claim; argues ideas were routed through North American and British academic centres and that total delinkage is neither feasible nor helpful. |
| Lester (2003) | Favours tracing causal connections between sites over simple comparison of parallels and differences. |
| Lester (2003) | Warns that cultural enthusiasm must not obscure the material injustices and 'structural inhumanity' of segregation and apartheid. |
| Mabin (1984) | Rejects descriptive, anthropomorphic and quantitative-mechanistic work. Uses a diachronic economic and social history to explain geographical change. |
| Maylam (1995) | Rejects crude instrumentalism and reductionism but warns against discarding material and structural analysis ('the baby and the bath-water'). |
| Murray (1989) | Murray defends Marxian class analysis centred on production and surplus-labour appropriation against the 'history from below' approach. He credits social history's empirical gains. |
| Murray (2006) | Murray sympathises with Maloka's social-history stance, but thinks Maloka is unfair in calling Kimble's earlier political-economy work 'structural reductionist' and in downplaying her posthumous book. |
| Murray (2006) | Murray shares Maloka's view that the pendulum has swung too far towards broadly cultural studies. |
| Pankhurst (1996) | Criticises the structural, deductive reserve-army model for ignoring agency and local variation; holds that state neglect or containment cannot alone explain northern impoverishment or migrant labour. |
| Parnell and Mabin (1995) | Argues that the social history school, by emphasising community resistance, has under-examined how segregated structures and racial categories were built. It calls for more attention to the perspectives of those in power. |
| Pogue (2006) | Criticises Johnstone and Leger for treating technology within a capital-labour or racial-discrimination frame and argues technologies also transformed social relations. |
| Tatham (1990) | Traces the shift from state-centred structuralism (fractionalists and capital logicians) to history from below. She registers the criticism that this risks becoming apolitical or fragmented empiricism. |