Coal capital: The shaping of social relations in the Stormberg, 1880-1910
Date
2014-10-22
Authors
Gibbs, Pat
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Abstract
This thesis is an analysis of the interaction of a variety of communities that coalesced around
the coal fields in the environs of the town of Molteno in the Stormberg mountains, during the
late Victorian period and the first decade of the 20th century. An influx of mining and
merchant capitalists, bankers and financiers, skilled miners and artisans from overseas and
Thembu labourers from across the Kei River flooded into what had been a quasi-capitalist
world dominated mainly by Afrikaner stock farmers, some English farmers and Thembu and
Khoi sharecroppers and labourers.
It also examines the brief life-span of a coal mining enterprise, which initially held out the
hope of literally fuelling South Africa’s industrial revolution, and its relationship with the
economically and socially significant railway, which it drew into the area.
This capitalisation of an early capitalist zone on the northern border of the Cape has
demanded an analysis of the intersecting economies of mining, farming and urbanisation as
well as of the race, class and ethnic formations generated by this interaction. In delineating
the day-to-day minutiae of events, this thesis seeks to reveal a microcosmic view of the
fortunes and identities of the associated communities and to present a distinctive, regional
study of a hitherto unknown and early aspect of South Africa’s mineral revolution.