SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa's remoteness from the wider world came to an end as a consequence of European seaborne expansion. From the mid-1600s, its southernmost Cape region became a fully fledged Dutch colony. The Dutch maintained control until 1795, when Britain seized the strategically advantageous Cape Colony during its battle with revolutionary France for command of the world's trading oceans. By the early nineteenth century, Britain was drawing this large new colonial possession into its long-haul routes of international trade and its network of imperial administration.

What British rule inherited was an agricultural territory with a dominant Dutch-speaking Boer settler minority of some 20,000; an unfree black population of over 25,000 imported slaves; around 15,000 mostly dispossessed pastoral Khoikhoi inhabitants, the remnants of a hunter-gatherer San ("Bushmen") population that had largely been decimated; and away to the east, a great mass of Bantu-speaking African peasants, thousands of whom were already incorporated within colonial borders through Boer expansion. These and the majority who still enjoyed precolonial independence lived in politically and culturally discrete societies. While lacking any imaginative conviction of a unified or even common African identity, chiefdoms were increasing in size and consolidating their political authority.

Processes of colonization and land alienation in favor of white settlers were intensified under more efficient British administration. The penetration of British capital, the influx of large groups of British immigrants, and the expansion of inland transport and shipping stimulated trade and raised levels of agricultural commercialization. In the Cape's eastern hinterland, where frontier settlers were tussling with African farmers for land, British regiments tipped the balance in a series of bitter land or frontier wars, as Xhosa peasants had their land expropriated for incoming settlers.

Incorporation of the Cape Colony into the British Empire also brought fundamental changes to the political and social relations of what had largely been a slave-based Dutch colonial society. British imperial humanitarianism introduced reforms to end what were seen as abuses and to bolster free capitalist development. The institution of slavery was abolished by the 1830s, ending the growth of unfree labor and adding freed slaves to landless Khoikhoi as a rural wage labor supply. Formal discrimination against "free persons of color" was also repealed in the 1820s, and the brutality of labor relations between employers and their laboring underclass was tempered by governing regulation. These ameliorative measures provided greater civic freedom for blacks fully incorporated into colonial society, but did not alter their economic subjection.

The major impulse behind the creation of a more liberal colonial order in South Africa was a liberal ideology introduced by Christian missionaries whose activities were now sponsored generously by British evangelical humanitarians. A spectrum of Protestant and other mission stations attracted a tributary of Christian black adherents, some fleeing from white farms in search of refuge and independence, some attracted to the economic possibilities offered by mission education and agricultural training, and others seeking new identities through conversion for lives ruptured by colonialism. Through the nineteenth century, new Christianized African classes emerged from this culture of improvement, including a modernizing peasantry, clergymen, teachers, lawyers, and journalists. Models of colonial collaboration, by the 1890s a number were eventually rejecting western mission churches for independent African versions of Christianity.

The emerging cleavages in South Africa were not only between white and black. Although the Cape Colony developed a parliamentary system and a level of responsible government resting on a common qualified franchise that privileged European political power, its colonists failed to unify. With little mixing between the British and a still predominant Boer-Afrikaner population, whites became ethnically divided. Most Boers resented the intrusive, reformist reach of British power, with poorer stock farmers in the east also chafing at a shortage of affordable land in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, around 15,000 Boers trekked northward into the South African hinterland, in a migration that became known as the Great Trek. By greatly extending the grip of European control, the incursion of trekkers into the interior had a profound impact upon the formation of a modern South Africa.

After a series of land clashes with Tswana, Ndebele, Zulu, and other resisting African societies, migrant Boer groups achieved their political purpose of breaking with Britain and establishing their own republican territories. Trekker power along the east coast in Natal proved short-lived, however, as Britain nabbed the region as a colony in 1842 to entrench its command of coastal merchant trade and control of the eastern sea route. Imperial settlement schemes were put in place to make the territory English. But on the interior highveld of South Africa, the independent agrarian Boer states of the Orange Free State and South African Republic (Transvaal) were established by the 1850s. Their establishment meant that the area of South Africa under European control and settlement roughly doubled between the 1830s and the 1850s.

Constituted as Calvinist states founded on European supremacy, for some decades these land-locked white republican polities remained rickety. Locked in endemic land and livestock conflicts with neighboring Basotho, Pedi, and other African chiefdoms, they were also unable to slip the economic leash of the influential British Cape, the largest, wealthiest, most thoroughly colonized, and most populated settler territory, containing well over 200,000 whites (representing more than twice the combined total of the three other European possessions) and around half a million blacks. The Cape's trading economy curled out from the main colonial harbors and merchant houses, pulling in wool, grain, wine, and other agricultural products, and transporting a large range of imported commodities to internal markets for white and black consumers. This intensifying and increasingly unified network of commercial transactions and human communication drew Boer maize producers and hunters, English artisans and rural traders, and African farm tenants and laborers into a new and expanding colonial society, even as settler society set on excluding black inhabitants from political power. In patriarchal Boer states, whites maintained an absolute monopoly of formal political authority, while settlers in British Natal enjoyed an effective monopoly. Even in the relatively more liberal racial order of the Cape Colony, the electoral weight of black voters was kept marginal by franchise property requirements.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, South Africa had been transformed into a dense patchwork of mostly small agrarian societies. In the case

of African peoples, some, like the Xhosa, had been conquered and partly incorporated. Other chiefdoms, like those of the Swazi, remained substantially independent. Yet, however uneven the impact of colonialism, black and white inhabitants were being laced together by the pulsating forces of settler expansionism and merchant capitalism, radiating out from northwestern Europe. In this part of sub-Saharan Africa, Britain looked to the Cape as the hinge of a future integrated state in South Africa, imposing colonial peace, efficient rule, and developing the fiscal strength to defend itself, eventually turning the region into a peaceful British Dominion or an African Canada, even though its modest economic prospects made it less attractive to British immigrants than other white settler territories of the empire.

Imperial expectations of a gradual rate of change in South Africa were unsettled after 1870, as abundant deposits of minerals were discovered in its interior. In 1867, diamonds were found in an area claimed by the Orange Free State. Once the enormous scale of the deposit had been confirmed, the British government moved smartly to frustrate Boer republican assertions and annexed the diamond fields in order to place the territory under the authority of the Cape. The impact of mining rapidly transformed the economy of the entire region.

By the early 1870s, over 20,000 new white immigrants, mostly British, had converged on the area of Kimberley, the diamond town. So had tens of thousands of African migrant laborers, drawn from virtually every peasant community within southern Africa. White commercial farmers as well

as wealthier black agriculturalists also exploited new opportunities triggered by the opening of major new markets for food and fuel. European imports soared, fostering mercantile integration and boosting railway and road construction between the main coastal ports and the interior. By 1880 there was a weekly steamship service between Britain and the Cape, as well as telegraph communication.

The rapid industrialization spawned by development of the diamond fields had profound consequences for the future of South African economy and society. Mining became characterized by huge concentrations of capital and growing mergers to cut competition, a monopoly thrust in which Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) figured prominently. Furthermore, the new industrialization of the labor force deepened the already marked colonial distinction between skilled white workers and unskilled black workers. In Kimberley, immigrant white workers carved out a privileged position, bolstered by political rights, higher wages, and freedom to live a family existence. Migrant African mineworkers were obliged to carry passes that controlled their urban movements, and were all accommodated in closed, all-male barracks, also known as compounds, which they could not leave for the duration of their labor contracts. This stark racial division at the outset of South African industrialization bore early traces of the urban segregationist structure that the country would develop, through racial institutions of labor control and the housing of cheap black migrant laborers in overcrowded, Spartan compounds.

For the British, diamonds made the construction of a stable, single political sphere more urgent. South Africa needed the stability of a common infrastructure to encourage and secure investment flows, and to regulate and funnel supplies of migrant labor to where these were most needed. From the mid-1870s, a forceful imperial push to bring about a confederation of the various South African colonies and territories was launched by the British colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon (1831–1890). This involved pressure on the Boer republics, and the breaking of what remained of independent African power, exemplified by the invasion and dismembering of Zululand at the end of the 1870s. But the confederation policy turned out to be a dismal failure, not least because Boer republicans were unwilling to relinquish their sovereignty. If anything, Britain's highhandedness, including its blundering annexation of a disorderly and indebted South African Republic in 1877, increased divisions and antagonisms in the region instead of smothering them. While they continued to assert their paramountcy over the sub-continent, the British were driven out of the Transvaal in 1881 and forced to assent to its renewed independence. If economic integration was proceeding apace, political unity still looked far off.

In the mid-1880s, the evolution of South Africa was altered once again by the advent of a further and much greater surge of heavy capitalist enterprise. Following the discovery of gold in the Transvaal's Witwatersrand, South Africa's supplies became pivotal to the underpinning of currencies and international trade during the balmy years of the Gold Standard. With Transvaal gold already amounting to over a quarter of total world production by 1898, mining followed the Kimberley model but on a far more massive scale, quickly surpassing the diamond fields in turning the South African interior into the largest industrial complex on the continent and the site of the world's biggest gold extraction.

By the end of the 1890s, there were over 100,000 migrant African mineworkers in urban compounds on the Rand, remitting wages to the countryside for agricultural investment in an effort to arrest declining levels of peasant subsistence through continuous land loss. The gold industry was also a magnet to tens of thousands of overseas immigrant miners, artisans, traders, industrialists, and financiers, mainly British, but including a mix of other European nationalities. From the beginning, the industrial revolution in which they participated produced heavy demands and difficulties. Deep-level mining required costly long-term investment and large quantities of cheap labor to ensure profitability. Companies acted in concert to reduce costs by creating a common pool of unskilled African migrants, eliminating wage competition, and driving down wages through the 1890s.

The mineral transformations also created a sharp contradiction between a foreign, fast-living capitalist enclave on the Rand and a mostly poor, intensely religious, agricultural Boer state run by landed patriarchs of limited administrative capacity. Politically, gold was a poisoned chalice. Its tax revenues strengthened the South African Republic. But its foreign or uitlander stake endangered ideals of a free and pure Boer existence on the highveld. Lastly, the new industrial growth of the Transvaal enabled it to begin prying itself free of British economic domination, and to expand its influence in ways that contested Britain's supremacy in South Africa, such as its refusal to join a customs union with British colonies, and its preference for Portuguese Mozambique as a foreign trade artery.

The result of British imperial pressure to bring the South African Republic to heel was war in 1899 when the Transvaal Boers, in alliance with those of the Orange Free State, opted for war to try to preserve the basis of their republican state. Fighting until the Boer states surrendered, the end of the Boer War in 1902 saw Britain extinguishing a Republican order in South Africa and turning the Boer territories into the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies under its direct rule. Although now a set of Crown colonies rather than a unified country, South Africa was under the ultimate authority of Alfred Milner (1854–1925), London's High Commissioner there from 1898 to 1905, and the chief engineer of British policy to Anglicize the ex-Republics by swamping them with British settlers. With that achieved, they could then be coaxed into joining the Cape and Natal in a loyal, self-governing imperial Dominion.

In some senses, Britain's designs failed. There was no mass British emigration after 1902, and Boers or Afrikaners continued to constitute some

60 percent of the white settler population of South Africa. Nor was their nationalism snuffed out, thanks to war memory of harsh military conquest and concentration camp sacrifice. On the other hand, as part of its reconstruction program, the British administration was committed to introducing self-government to incorporated Afrikaner territories on terms agreed to at the 1902 peace agreement, that the franchise would be restricted to white men and that the position of white property rights would be upheld. This produced a chorus of protest from blacks who had mostly been vehemently pro-British during the war and had anticipated some kind of emancipatory outcome to postwar reconstruction. But the London government was much more concerned with securing compromises and resolving competing claims between Afrikaner and British colonies in order to reconcile former republicans to imperial interests, than to lose much sleep over black grievances at political exclusion.

After much economic and political bargaining between the various colonies to achieve white "conciliation," the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, comprising around 1.2 million whites and over 5 million blacks. The formation of a unitary state with parliamentary sovereignty and supreme central state authority over all local institutions ended the colonial problem of South Africa for British imperial authority. Its inaugural Afrikaner leaders, Louis Botha (1862–1919) and Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950), both republican generals who had fought against Britain during the 1899–1902 war, were more than prepared to shed Boer republicanism and let bygones be bygones. The principal British imperial connection through South African gold, which by 1914 amounted to over a third of the world's supply, enhanced prospects of strong industrial progress, urban expansion, and demoraphic growth. Furthermore, a racially segregationist Union would consolidate white authority, provide the scaffolding for the construction of a national white South African identity, and ease the implementation of a common "native policy," especially in labor supply and control.

The Union's independent Dominion status did little to weaken its dependent links to Britain. In 1914 it went to war promptly as a region of the British Empire, notwithstanding political opposition from many nationalist Afrikaners.

See alsoAfrica; Boer War; Colonialism; Colonies; Imperialism; Rhodes, Cecil.

bibliography

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William Nasson