Abstract
Henry Rider Haggard's imperial romance King Solomon's Mines was composed during a transitional period; South Africa was beginning to assume a major position in the British empire. The emergence of South Africa's mineral industries transformed the country from a service station en route to India to a global centre of industrial production. Historians Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone remark that this transformation created a striking unevenness of socio-economic relations. A distinctively brutal system of forced labor thus developed. King Solomon's Mines is a contemporary response to this emergence of imperial capitalism. It is also a response to recent archaeological investigations into the nearby ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Haggard conflates these two phenomena to mythologize imperial history and its extraction of mineral wealth.
Published Version
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