2 - Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism: The Hundred-Year Origins of the 1899 South African War

Summary

The South African War of 1899–1902 was the culmination – if not an inevitable one – of a hundred years of British domination of the region. That domination began with the seizure of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch in 1795, beginning an economic and ideological as well as political hegemony. Britain's presence in South Africa followed from strategic assumptions born of its need to defend Indian Ocean interests. Strategic considerations meant that the British, like the Dutch before them, had to provision the Indian Ocean's naval and mercantile fleets. Settler expansion into more and more distant hinterlands – to secure ecological zones where crops or stock could be raised – not only had to be allowed but also had to be furthered with imperial troops. The impact of British rule in South Africa, with Downing Street's power and Whitehall's administration, was willy-nilly, turning social structures in the Cape, and beyond, into a series of new and changing collaborations, alliances, oppositions and identities. Expansion required conquering African territories and, thereafter, the distribution of African land and labour. This was a process that mostly favoured British merchants and traders at the expense of Dutch Afrikaner settlers in the interior. Eventually, local ethnic and regional groupings were provoked into a new assertiveness and began to acquire objectives of their own. In this way, subimperialisms emerged. Then, in the last third of the century, the region was further transformed by the discovery of diamonds and, thereafter, gold. Out of these latter discoveries came a powerful and confident mining capitalism embedded in South Africa but linked to the world's major financial centre, which was the City of London. Determining how these transformations took place and how interactions among the imperial state, settler ambitions and capitalist enclaves eventually erupted into war is the major purpose of this chapter. The analysis and the narrative that trace these developments have a well-known and considerable, if contentious, literature. It stretches from the contemporary observers of empire and imperialism to the analysts and the analysis operating before and after the South African War. The first section of what follows examines the many forces shaping the political economy of southern Africa in the period up to the mid-1890s. Section II concentrates on the tumultuous years between circa 1895 and 1899, from the moment when the discovery of ‘deep levels’ of gold underneath the first Rand caused the pace of events to quicken throughout the region.