An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination and Development (review)

The late Charles Feinstein is not well known to Africanists. An influential economic historian of Britain, he was born in Johannesburg in 1932 and as a student flirted with Marxism before moving to England and embracing neoclassical economics. Feinstein describes himself as a "novice in the field of South African history" (xvii) who last studied South African economic history under Helen Suzman at Wits in 1950. After 1990, he returned regularly to teach in Cape Town.

In this, his last work, inspired by apartheid's demise and first presented as the 2004 Ellen McArthur Lectures at Cambridge, Feinstein has crafted a fine economic history, the first in many decades, of his homeland. He deftly leads readers through the main trends of South African economic life from precolonial days to the end of apartheid. He is at his best detailing economic phases and explaining causes of change or stagnation. His analysis of apartheid's economic crisis is convincing, and his humanism is clear in his close attention to the plight of Africans. He notes that it is inappropriate to consider "average income" without reference to extreme racial inequality.

After setting South Africa in international economic perspective and sketching precolonial economies, Feinstein cogently explains colonial dispossession and the making of a bonded labor force. He then details the mining revolution; the rise of color bars, manufacturing, and commercial agriculture; apartheid; the postwar boom; and how growth turned to stagnation with gold's decline and manufacturing's failure to spur export-led growth. He concludes by surveying the retreat from apartheid, emphasizing the impact of sanctions, balance-of-payment crises, and labor market changes. Three annexes present extra data on land, unemployment, and population.

These trends are well known to South African historians, and Feinstein concedes that his book is a synthesis, rather than a study based on primary research. However, he writes in a clear, analytical style, always probing the roots of contradictions: cheap black labor, weak domestic market, high unit cost. Sections on industrialization, capital formation, productivity, and time series are particularly well done, as are those on the crisis years of the 1980s. By the 1990s, apartheid's material base had collapsed.

Feinstein presents ample statistical evidence and freely cites government reports and contemporary analyses, lending the work a nice historical flavor, albeit at the expense of the African voices and insights offered by revisionist social historians such as Ian Phimister. (However, works such as Phimister's Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe are well represented in his Guide to Reading). More might have been said, however, on early African economies, black unions, business, the auto industry, and the Southern African region. The emphasis on economic cycles leads to some repetitiveness.

After presenting such a well-measured history the author, surprisingly, ends with a storm in a teacup by trying to equate the ideology of the apartheid regime with that of its fiercest critics, the radical Marxians. Dredging up the earlier debate over capitalism and apartheid, Feinstein argues that the radicals posited that "apartheid was necessary for capitalism[,].... they were mutually reinforcing" (247). Yet the radicals were engaged not in a cliometric exercise of measuring productivity—the significance of which, he stresses, both groups underestimated—but in a very political battle to show how, in a particular historical conjuncture, white capital benefited from racism. Ironically, and inevitably, Feinstein's empirical data serve to underline the radicals' assertion (if couched in turgid prose and overestimating the centrality of cheap labor) of this symbiotic relationship. His argument that individual capitalists, rather than their class, profited from cheap labor may have had resonance in the rosy afterglow of apartheid's fall, but it fails to take into account monopoly trends, today's soaring unemployment, widening inequality, and the chilly winds of globalization, which suggest that capitalism can adapt as much, and as profitably, to South African nonracial democracy as to apartheid.

This comprehensive survey...