The origins of agrarian capitalism in South Africa: a reply

Abstract

In recent times there has been an upsurge in debate over rural matters amongst scholars of South Africa, characterised by sharply differing theoretical and methodological approaches and not a little vituperation. In a sense this is a welcome and inevitable development, triggered by the publication of a number of rural studies penned by academic historians.1 The 1980s have been characterised by the rise of a new 'social history' of industrial South Africa which has borne rich fruits, much of which has retained an implicit concern with larger structural questions, but much of which has tended to draw attention away from issues of political economy, and has become a substitute for engagement with fundamental political and theoretical questions. But what has emerged recently has been a restatement of conflicts between those loosely (and not necessarily accurately) defined as structuralists whose primary concern has been with questions of theory, and those who have been characterised (equally loosely) as 'social historians'. It is perhaps inevitable that these schisms have been revived by considerations of rural history, for it is in the conceptualisation of agrarian transformations that we might begin to reopen central issues relating to the way we interpret South Africa's past, and also by extension its present and its future. South Africa unquestionably has undergone over the course of this century an industrial revolution, and the economic, social and political aspects of that industrial revolution have received a great deal of attention. But accumulation and class formation in the pre-industrial colonial economy are still little understood, and rural transformations in the industrial age have also until recently been very sketchily and unsatisfactorily investigated. My contention is that it is in understanding longer-term dynamics of