The Recruiting of Chinese Indentured Labour for the South African Gold-Mines, 1903–1908

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
South African ◽  
Vertical Integration ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
South African War ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
High Degree

One of the responses of the Transvaal gold mining industry to the economic crisis after the South African War of 1899–1902 was to import Chinese indentured mine labour. To facilitate this process and to integrate it with the overall demands and requirements of the industry, the mining companies established a recruiting and shipping company in 1904, known as the Chamber of Mines Labour Importation Agency. This short-lived company, which was characterized by a high degree of vertical integration, operated as recruiting and shipping agency in China, receiving agent in Natal and co-ordinating and advising agent in the Transvaal. Despite complex arrangements designed to exploit the Chinese labour market, the company was, generally speaking, successful in securing the requisite labour force of suitable size and quality for the Transvaal mines. However, it showed a longer-term susceptibility to competitive pressures in the northern Chinese labour market. The company was amalgamated with WNLA in 1908.

Mozambican Labour Regimes and the Eastern Main Line

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Charles van Onselen
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Main Line ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
The South ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Line P ◽  
Voluntary Basis ◽  
Low Wages

The South African mining industry profited from the slave- and forced-labour regimes that preceded it in the adjacent Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Many of the earliest migrants were part of a labour force ‘recruited’ through coercion. Black Mozambicans later preferred to work as cheap, indentured migrant labourers rather than face working for no or low wages in their own country. The chapter explains how this helped underpin the illusion that black labour was somehow free, mobile and voluntary. But as southern Mozambique became progressively more underdeveloped economically, the need to coerce black labour became less necessary and the system was said to be operating on a wholly voluntary basis as part of an economy dominated by ‘market forces’.

The Randlords in 1895: A Reassessment

1972 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert V. Kubicek
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Deep Level ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
South African War

Ever since J. A. Hobson characterized financiers as monolithic and conspiratorial, particularly those who were supposed to have been responsible for manipulating decisively events which led to the outbreak of the South African war, historians have stressed the need to examine their financial activities. However, the South African goldmining financiers have not been as thoroughly scrutinized as the politicians (Chamberlain and Kruger) or the administrators (Loch, Rosmead and Milner). Rhodes, of course, has been much studied, but more as politician and imperial strategist than as a Randlord. One recent exception to this neglect is G. Blainey's study based on an examination of mining techniques and technology. He asserts that a certain sector of the mining industry was hard hit by the policies of the Transvaal government, and that it was Randlords from this deprived sector (the deep-level operators) who triggered the Johannesburg uprising. What follows, based on the records of the mining houses, attempts to answer several questions about the key Randlords in 1895 which have often been raised but not satisfactorily answered. How monolithic and conspiratorial were the Randlords? What devices did they use to generate capital and take profits? What in 1895 were precisely their financial requirements and expectations? Was there, as Blainey suggests, a common concern about capital wants and anticipated profits which distinguished Randlords who participated in the attempt to overthrow Kruger's republic in 1895 from those who did not?IIGroups which search for profits are no more free of internecine disputes than groups which seek power.

The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker’: Medical Research and the Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall M. Packard
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
Effective Vaccine ◽  
The South ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
Political Economic

In 1903 the South African mining industry began recruiting African labor from Central Africa in order to shore up their labor supplies. From the outset, Central African recruitment was problematic, for Central African mine workers died at very high rates. The primary source of Central African mortality was pneumonia. In response to this high mortality the Union government threatened to close down Central African recruitment, a threat which they carried out in 1913. From 1911 to 1933, the mining industry fought to maintain, and then after 1913 to regain access to Central African labor. Of central importance in this struggle were efforts to develop a vaccine against pneumonia. While the mine medical community failed to produce an effective vaccine against pneumonia, the Chamber of Mines successfully employed the promise of a vaccine eventually to regain access to Central African Labor in 1934. The mines achieved this goal by controlling the terrain of discourse on the health of Central African workers, directing attention away from the unhealthy conditions of mine labor and toward the imagined cultural and biological peculiarities of these workers. In doing so the mines constructed a new social category, ‘tropical workers’ or ‘tropicals’. The paper explores the political, economic and intellectual environment within which this cultural construction was created and employed.

German Capital, The Netherlands Railway Company and the Political Economy of the Transvaal 1886–1900

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.J. Van Helten
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Gold Mining ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Railway Company ◽  
South African War ◽  
German Capital ◽  
The Hague ◽  
The Republic

This article tries to throw light on one aspect of the ‘business partition’ of Africa, namely Anglo–erman economic rivalry on the Rand between 1886 and 1900. It examines the activities of the German-owned Netherlands South African Railway Company (N.Z.A.S.M.), which possessed the monopoly of construction and management of all railways connecting the republic with a seaport. The article assesses this company's impact upon the relations of the South African Republic with both the maritime colonies of the Cape and Natal and with Great Britain. Whitehall regarded the N.Z.A.S.M. as the fountainhead of ever-increasing German commercial and political penetration in the Transvaal and also considered the railway company hostile to its interests in that it allegedly discriminated against British commerce. The gold-mining industry also viewed the company with hostility, since its high freightrates increased the price of imported machinery, foodstuffs, etc. The South African Republic, on the other hand, saw the N.Z.A.S.M. as a useful means of access to both the German and Dutch capital markets, while the company arranged for diplomatic lobbying in Berlin and The Hague in favour of the Republic.By 1898, German mining interests on the Rand had managed to persuade Berlin that their interests were not served by either the Kruger regime or the German-owned N.Z.A.S.M. and that an administration more favourably disposed towards their objectives, and possibly imposed by force by the British, should not be opposed. It is therefore argued that the South African War was prompted mainly by the desire to establish British commercial hegemony on the Rand, to safeguard the interests of international mining capital and to create a more pliable polity capable of articulating and responding to these particular economic imperatives.

scholarly journals POPPIES AND GOLD: OPIUM AND LAW-MAKING ON THE WITWATERSRAND, 1904–10

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
THEMBISA WAETJEN
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South African ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
South African War ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Law Making

AbstractIn the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force.

Coal, Rail and Victorians in the South African Veld. The Convergence of Colonial Elites and Finance Capital in the Stormberg Mountains of the Eastern Cape, 1880–1910

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Pat Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
The South ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
Class System ◽  
The North ◽  
South African War ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
The Town

This article investigates an intermediary period in the Cape colony when the largely unknown convergence of British social and industrial capital around coal mining occurred in the Stormberg Mountains of the North Eastern Cape. Within the context of a triangular nexus of mining and its two major clients, the diamond mines at Kimberley and the newly arrived Cape Government Railway, a social coalescence of mainly British immigrants arose in the town of Molteno, exhibiting an distinctly British Victorian culture. This paper also shows how the town became a colonial enclave on the remote periphery of the Cape Colony, utilising a racialised class system, and the ways in which the singularity of Victorian society was emphasised by two surrounding cultures which were alien to the British. After the South African War ended, one of these cultures had begun to take root within the town. When the coal mines were brought to an end by the erratic orders of the Cape Government Railway and its access to superior and cheaper coal from Lewis and Marks at Viljoensdrift in the ZAR and the greater economic pull of the Rand gold mines which diverted labour to the north, this ‘colonial moment’ in the Stormberg was over.

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