A history of South African capitalism in national and global perspective

Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee locate the development of South African capitalism in the context of global developments in the long twentieth century, arguably the first time that such an analysis has been attempted. This paper grapples with multiple relationships, including that between the local and the global, the universal and the particular, and the historical and the present. The durable features of South African capitalism since its modern inception, it is argued, are mining, racial domination and an uneven relationship between the state, finance and industry. Although the national economy went through long swings between an external and internal orientation, each of the main periods highlighted in their analysis has been marked by both.