Lord Milner and the S.A. State
Date
1979-06
Authors
Marks, Shula
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Abstract
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.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented June 1979
Keywords
South Africa. History. 1836-1909