The contribution of entrepreneurs to the emergence of manufacturing in South Africa before 1948

Abstract

The early efforts of manufacturers have been dismissed as too small and too unsophisticated to matter. Despite some sympathetic depictions of regional developments during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, there has been a general tendency to write off pre-1930s manufacturing as : largely confined to the production of fairly basic consumer goods... a small and vulnerable sector, with strictly limited prospects for development. Many writers also depict manufacturers as dependent creations of particular state policies and of the mining sector. The authors who hold these views usually date the emergence of 'real' manufacturing to 1925 or later, after the National Party, in a pact with the Labour Party, came into power and implemented a new kind of tariff policy.