3 - Technological Innovation and the Scientific Imagination in Mining and Agriculture, 1870–1902

Summary

Technical innovation in agriculture preceded that in mining, and the value of colonial agricultural production exceeded that of diamonds throughout the nineteenth century. After the Cape received responsible government in 1874 a colonial scientific bureaucracy was gradually expanded to include a veterinary surgeon, a Department of Agriculture, and a state botanist, geologist, entomologist and marine biologist. The discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s reshaped the contours of race and science. Mining became reliant on increasingly sophisticated technology and on cheap black labour. Rapid growth in the mining sector has been analysed by historians in terms of the relationship between capital and labour. Scientific and technological innovations were also critical: applied geology, water pumps, explosives, stamping gear and the recently discovered cyanide process for gold extraction. The geostrategic importance of southern Africa became a point of growing competition, and the borders of a unitary South African state in 1910 emerged out of wars of conquest against African societies and intense conflict between English- and Dutch-speaking citizens. Imperial conquest and expansion were in turn associated with rapid technological change: steamships, railways, transatlantic cables and breech loading rifles. Together these constituted a ‘full-blown socio-technical imaginary’.