More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939
| dc.contributor.author | Van Sittert, Lance | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2011-05-26T06:53:17Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2011-05-26T06:53:17Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1992-08-26 | |
| dc.description | African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 October 1992 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | An emerging environmental history in South Africa has so far focused exclusively on terrestrial environments and their human-resource interactions (land, game, forests) (1). In so doing it has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist and social history of the past two decades and careful to locate environmental issues in the broader social, economic and political context-of an emerging capitalism in Southern Africa. No attempt has yet been made, however, to extend the scope of this endeavour to encompass the marine resource and recent environmental literature on the subject still evidences a strong present-mindedness which strongly detracts from its analysis (2). The marine environment is innately hostile to capitalism, except in its petty or merchant forms, by virtue of its common property status and susceptibility to a range of "natural factors" which disrupt production (3). For productive capitalism to succeed in such a hostile environment, it needs to be able to limit the effects of both these factors on accumulation in order to justify investment. In South Africa this was achieved after 1945 through large-scale central state intervention, assuming ownership of the resource and conferring de facto private property rights on private exploiters and lessening the effect of "natural factors" on production through the provision of infrastructure and marine research (4). Prior to this, capital's successful exploitation of the marine resource was fundamentally dependent on untrammelled access, relying on the sure abundance of the latter to compensate for the detractions of non-ownership and the vagaries of weather and resource. These constraints also made marine resources a low development priority alongside mining and agriculture and saw them relegated to the realm of the regional maritime state which was too weak exercise effective ownership, confer ownership rights on capital or mediate the effects of natural factors on production. The Cape colonial etate concentrated its efforts on developing deep sea trawling, but after 1910 the provincial state confined itself to the "preservation" of fish and game. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10539/9946 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | African Studies Institute;ISS 444 | |
| dc.subject | Crayfish industry. Economic aspects. South Africa. History. Congresses | en_US |
| dc.subject | Marine resources conservation. South Africa. History. Congresses | en_US |
| dc.subject | Capitalism. South Africa. History. Congresses | en_US |
| dc.title | More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939 | en_US |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en_US |