The peculiarities of South African history: Thompsonian social history and the limits of colonialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the late 1970s, South Africanist social history of broadly Thompsonian characteristics richly explicated the experiences of South Africa’s African population under ‘racial capitalism’. This article asks what value this scholarship might have in a moment when South African universities (like their British and American counterparts) face calls for the decolonization of curricula. Social historians delineated the peculiar nature of South Africa’s precocious but uneven capitalist transformation under colonial conditions, accounting for the preservation and resilience of communal rural areas falling under the control of chiefs and the dominance of oscillating migrant labour. Where structuralists saw a political economy tailor-made for mining capital, social historians identified important limits to the powers of capital and colonialism in the region – limits set, in large part, by the region’s African communities. Underlining the tragic irony of the powerful symbiosis between the patriarchal and ethnically defined livelihood strategies of (male) African migrant labourers and the interests of mining capital and segregationists, South Africanist social historians advanced a significantly less romantic vision of ‘the commons’ than that typically found in Thompson’s work or the work of his students.