A ghost from the past: the South African developmental state of the 1940s

Bill Freund offers an account of the development of South African capitalism through the lens of the 'development state' model. This model is a label used in the variety of capitalism literature to describe state-business relations in some Asian economies, including Japan, in the post war era. Though focusing on the 1940s, Freund examines the early signs of such a model in the period immediately after the South African (Boer) war, associated with Alfred, Lord Milner, which has come to be known as the 'reconstruction' period. While conventional wisdom associates the policy initiatives of the 1924 Pact government around industrial and labour policy to the need to accommodate 'poor whites', Freund, following Christie, Clark and others, also argues that these and related policies also incorporated strong elements of industrialization (arguably though cautiously), even 'developmentalism'