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The Apartheid and Jim Crow Economies: A Comparative Analysis

Literature › Works

Gavin Wright (2012). The Apartheid and Jim Crow Economies: A Comparative Analysis. World Economic History Congress 2012.
Type conference paper
Scope Comparative and methods
Method synthesis review
Period studied 1870–1994
Regions South Africa, American South
Themes comparative theory, business and state, politics ideology elections, sanctions divestment, resistance social movements, labour markets wages, inequality poverty unemployment, origins segregation, transition post apartheid
Citation key wright2012

Argument

Wright asks whether apartheid and Jim Crow were economically viable for the favoured white class, not whether they were efficient. Using the conclusions of his Civil Rights study, he argues that southern business saw no conflict between segregation and modernization and gave way only under protest and federal pressure. For South Africa he argues the apartheid economy served whites well until the 1980s. He attributes its breakdown mainly to intensified internal resistance and international pressure, coupled with white South Africa's determination to keep the regime, rather than to inherent inefficiency. He concedes large structural differences between the two cases: demography, constitutional structure, explicit labour regulation and state capacity. The paper is a proposal, with a thin evidentiary base for South Africa.

Evidence and method

Secondary literature (Feinstein, Lewis, Clark and Worger, Nattrass and Seekings, Mariotti, Porter, Lowenberg, Moll) and Wright's own manuscript on the American South. Data come from Penn World Tables GDP per capita (Figs 6-7), Leibbrandt et al. income by race (Fig 8), and US Census and EEOC series. Quotations from Hailey, Bunche and Mandela are drawn from other authors' books.

Findings

  • Southern employers saw no economic impediment from Jim Crow and did not voluntarily desegregate workplaces. (p. 2)

    In South Carolina (the one state that officially monitored employment by race), 90 percent of new manufacturing jobs were filled by whites between 1940 and 1965.

  • Demography differs sharply, so the US South could not have sustained South African-style wage differentials. (p. 5)

    In South Africa, two-thirds to three-fourths of the population was African throughout the twentieth century, while whites comprised little more the one-fifth of the total in 1930

  • Apartheid's territorial segregation was designed to produce migrant labour for the mines. (p. 6)

    Because farming opportunities in these areas was so limited, the effect (and no doubt the intent) was to generate a migratory labor supply for the mines.

  • South Africa had far more explicit, legalistic colour bars and union-enforced job reservation than the US South. (p. 6)

    The color bar and job reservation systems were far more explicit and legalistic in South Africa than in the Jim Crow South.

  • Postwar growth made apartheid look compatible with modernization, with manufacturing leading. (p. 9)

    South Africa's growth rate accelerated still further during the postwar "golden age," so that real GDP per capita nearly doubled between 1948 and 1970.

  • Wright cautions against attributing every economic failing to apartheid and against conflating inefficiency with resistance effects. (p. 9)

    First, it is all too easy to attribute every South African economic failing to the evil of apartheid.

  • Judged by white well-being, the white average income exceeded the American average for 1950-1980. (p. 10)

    Figure 7 implies that the average white South African had a higher real income than the average American between 1950 and 1980.

  • Job reservation was relaxed as skill shortages emerged, and employers stabilised labour relations with African workers. (p. 10)

    as skill shortages emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the reservation bar was relaxed to open semi-skilled jobs to Africans, in an implicit bargain that benefited all parties.

  • The 1980s breakdown is attributed mainly to resistance and external pressure rather than inherent unsoundness. (p. 11)

    the economic breakdown of the 1980s was primarily caused by the intensification of internal and international resistance to the apartheid regime

  • Business turned against Botha's policies late, and the 1985 Chase Manhattan loan refusal is cited as a trigger. (p. 12)

    In July 1985, Chase Manhattan refused to roll over its short-term South African loans

  • Whites would not have accepted fundamental change without massive pressure. (p. 12)

    Left to their own devices, in the absence of massive external and internal pressures, it seems that whites would not have pushed for or accepted fundamental regime change in either case.