The Dynamics of Rural Accumulation in South Africa: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Abstract

The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and modernisation has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the atmosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Africa since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the beneficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and antithesis occupy the same battleground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses. What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world; exposure to market forces is thus apparently destined either to reshape third world societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to “underdevelop” them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles.