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  • An African Trading Empire: The Story of Susman Brothers and Wulfsohn, 1901-2005
  • David Gordon
Hugh Macmillan . An African Trading Empire: The Story of Susman Brothers and Wulfsohn, 1901-2005. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, New York. ii + 492 pp. Maps. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $74.95. Cloth.

In this detailed yet readable volume, Hugh Macmillan traces the network of southern and central African businesses established by two Jewish brothers from the Baltic states, Elie and Harry Susman. Their activities ranged across present-day Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, and to a lesser extent, Angola and Mozambique. The origins of their businesses were Zambian, in particular in the Western Province, Barotseland, where the Susman brothers began their cattle-trading business in 1901 through an alliance with the Lozi Paramount, Lewanika. After their partnership with Harry Wulfsohn, another Jewish immigrant to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), in 1944, the associated enterprises stretched across the region—even influencing such retail giants as Woolworths in South Africa and Marks and Spencer in England.

Macmillan skillfully wrestles the details of their ventures from personal and business papers combined with local government archives and interviews with employees and the descendents of the Susman brothers and Harry Wulfsohn. The book portrays the characters behind the businesses and details their intellectual and entrepreneurial energies. Macmillan is almost in awe of the qualities of the Susman-Wulfsohn entrepreneurs: "a capacity for hard work, resilience in the face of difficulties, an ability to spot gaps in the market and new opportunities... to make things happen, to create business, employment, and wealth, in some of the most inaccessible places in the world" (420). While the book is not a hagiography, the Susman brothers and Harry Wulfsohn could hardly have found a more generous biographer of their lives, ventures, and legacies.

The lack of critical reflection is misleading in at least two regards. First, the story of the Susman brothers, Harry Wulfsohn, and their descendents may leave some readers with the impression that "the Jews" of southern [End Page 219] Africa constituted a class of uniformly successful entrepreneurs, driven by determination in the face of anti-Semitism and helped along by their "membership of important global and regional networks" (412). This would be an unfortunate reading: "the Jews" of southern Africa did not form a coherent ethnic group, were divided politically, and had uneven economic success. Occasionally they aligned themselves with exploited Africans; in most cases, they did their utmost to belong to settler society and to exploit available economic opportunities. A few families were remarkably successful; but this hardly accounts for the tens of thousands of Jews who made their way to southern Africa. (As Macmillan notes, southern African was the second most popular destination after the United States for Jews fleeing eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.)

Readers familiar with the region cannot help being impressed with the range of well-known companies in which the Susman Brothers and Wulfsohn were involved: trading, ranching, butcheries, textiles, farming, and timber. This leads us to a second shortcoming: Macmillan does not attempt to distill the broader significance of their particular successes and failures. To what extent does the story of the Susman Brothers and Wulfsohn help us understand the history of business and the broader economic history of the region? In some senses, their lives and activities confirm aspects of a classic dependency perspective, which views such entrepreneurs as a peripheral bourgeoisie whose success rested on the export of raw materials and the import of higher-value-added products. The export of cattle and the chain of stores set up across the Zambian countryside formed the basis of their business; despite the anti-Semitism and distrust of the early colonial administration, their activities fit in to a colonial economy that exported labor and raw materials to the mining regions of the Copperbelt and Witwatersrand. Attempts to break out of this mold with the formation of manufacturing companies such as Zambia Textiles were never very profitable, despite their longevity. For the most part, Macmillan blames adverse political conditions for the failure of manufacturing ventures, including shortsighted takeovers...

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