Africana Library

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Has files: YesSubject: search.filters.subject.South Africa. History. 1836-1909

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    Joseph Chamberlain and South Africa
    (1983-08-04) Marsh, Peter
    The most remarkable feature of Joseph Chamberlains government of the Empire was his attempt to command assent at home and abroad. At home he was extraordinarily successful. His complicity in the Jameson Raid and his responsibility for the long, expensive and no more than marginally successful war with the South African republics made that achievement only the more remarkable. But abroad, particularly in South Africa, success eluded him. That lack of success raised questions about the worth of his whole imperial enterprise, questions to which most people now, historians and laymen alike, would give the same negative answer. Conscious of the risk of failure though equally confident of the possibility of success, Chamberlain concentrated his final energies on an attempt to harness domestic and colonial economic self-interest to the chariot of the Empire, This time success eluded him at home, though he might have been able to turn the tide there if fate had allowed him the same vigorous old age that Gladstone and later Churchill enjoyed. But this part of Chamberlain's story lies outside my concern in this essay. What I want to suggest here is the liberal as well as authoritarian character of his leadership of the Empire particularly in South Africa during his tenure as Colonial Secretary.
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    Lord Milner and the S.A. State
    (1979-06) Marks, Shula
    The years between 1886 and 1910 were amongst the most dramatic in the history of southern Africa. Mineral discoveries at Kimberley in 1868, followed by the more important discovery of vast seams of deep-level gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, inaugurated an industrial revolution whose socio-economic and political repercussions constitute the major themes of Southern Africa's twentieth-century history. Whereas at the beginning of the period, the region was still composed of a cluster of British colonies, Afrikaner republics, African protectorates and kingdoms, by 1910 the entire area as far north as Katanga was under British rule, and the societies of the sub-continent were being increasingly meshed into a single political economy. It was a political economy, moreover, in which the vision expressed by Sir Alfred Milner in 1897 of ‘a self-governing white community... supported by a well-treated and justly governed black labour force from Cape Town to the Zambezi’ was being given effect —even if there is room for doubt about the precise definition of 'well-treated and justly governed'. A major colonial war (familiar to most as the Boer War) — perhaps the costliest in lives and money during the ‘scramble’ for Africa — against the Afrikaner republics, as well as numerous ‘little wars’ against African people, had led to the creation of a new colonial state south of the Limpopo. Moreover, with the unification of South Africa in 1910, boundaries were drawn and a stale system brought into being whose characteristics were to provide the foundation for the capitalist development of South Africa and imperial ambitions in the region for the next half-century and more.
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    Sub-imperialism, primitive acculumation, and state formation: The making of a Boer Republic
    (1987-03-23) Keegan, Timothy
    This paper focuses on colonial economy and society in the crucial but recently neglected middle years of the Nineteenth century, on the assumption that only by understanding the dynamic processes of accumulation and dispossession in pre-industrial South Africa can the complex origins of the contemporary racial order be fully understood. Its specific concern is the Transorangian interior in a particularly revealing period of social, economic arid political transition. In attempting to explain the origins and significance of the Boer republic founded in 1854, the paper explores the relationship between imperial expansionism and colonial capitalism; and it examines the emergence of ruling elites, the forms of accumulation they employed and the nascent state structures they relied on to support and legitimate their activities. A skeletal narrative section will follow, and then the issues that are raised there will be discussed and analysed in a concluding section.