‘Making like America’: the industrialisation of the St Helena Bay Fisheries c. 1936‐c. 1956

Abstract

This paper offers a critique of structuralist theories of the salience of ‘external determinants’ in South Africa's post‐1945 industrialisation by way of a case study of the St Helena Bay fisheries, which underwent rapid industrialisation and subsequent deindustrialisation during and after the Second World War. This process was characterised by the state‐engineered articulation of secondary factory production with a primary fishing sector dominated by small boat owners. The reasons for this articulation are located in the nature of primary production, the rise of trade unionism in the fisheries during the war and Afrikaner nationalism's concern to foster small capital. The boat owning petty‐bourgeoisie which emerged at the Bay comprised a substantial speculative element and was unwilling to invest in new technology capable of freeing fishing from its dependence on environmental constraints. The combination of falling prices on the international market and falling catches at the Bay after 1953 created a se...