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The Cape fur seal was an abundant resource in southern Africa, when first discovered by itinerant sailing vessels in the late 16th century. Seals were slaughtered indiscriminately by the sailors for skins, meat and oil for three centuries from around 1600 to 1899. Government controls over the sealing industry were first introduced as late as 1893, by which time at least 23 seal colonies had become extinct and the seal population had been significantly reduced. This paper reconstructs the historical seal harvest from the time of arrival of the first settlers in 1652 up to 1899. These data are then compared with modern harvest data from 1900 to 2000, illustrating the marked increase in the harvest from about 1950, and the concomitant recovery of the seal population to a level of around 1.5-2 million animals.

Redistributive processes do not belong to the pantheon of Neo-liberalism. In this framework, inequality of resources can only be addressed by equality of opportunity. Even in ‘softer’ impersonations of Neo-liberalism, corporate (mis)behaviour is tamed by corporate social responsibility, not by state disciplinary action. Yet, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the state can not ignore political pressure for redistribution, even if only rhetorically. The process of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt at marrying redistribution and Neo-liberal economic policy. The South African state, however, has different degrees of power to force real or imagined redistributive efforts in different sectors of the economy. Fisheries – along with energy, telecommunications, and mining – is one of the sectors where the allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the state theoretically more likely to be successful in achieving BEE. In this paper, we examine redistributive processes in the hake deep-sea trawl (HDST) industry through a historical analysis of the principles, narratives and management systems that have been used to identify certain groups as ‘legitimate fishers’ since the late nineteenth century. We place this evolution as a background for a nuanced understanding of the first allocation of long-term fishing rights that took place in early 2006. We conclude that BEE, despite ist formal intentions, is doubly conducive to the interests of large-scale South African capital – for which investment in fishing is only one among many others. First, it has largely confirmed the historical share of fishing rights to incumbent, largely white-controlled, operators. It has also allowed for the more flexible allocation of rights via the market in response to changing environmental, economic and social conditions. Second, BEE has created a new layer of ‘black captains of industry’ to whom incumbent players are increasingly outsourcing primary production in a volatile, high-risk, and currently loss-leading sector. While fishing operations are being outsourced under the banner of redistribution, fish trade is still effectively controlled downstream by white capital through logistics, distribution, marketing and branding assets.

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. This paper explores the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, its origins, and its points of contact with the experience of ‘empowerment’ in Malaysia. The authors review the different steps taken by the South African government in promoting empowerment over the past 12 years, together with some of outcomes to date. They also draw from three case studies of sectors where government has different degrees of leverage over the process of BEE – industrial fisheries, metals and engineering, and wine. The paper highlights that the new ‘broad-based’ configuration of BEE has become a managerial and technocratic process that may thwart the overall objectives of ‘empowerment’ in at least four ways. First, it is moving the debate from a political terrain, where redistribution is in theory possible, to a managerial terrain, where discussions are technical and set within the limits of codification, measurement intervals and systemic performance. Second, by so doing, it is partially shifting the responsibility for promoting change and for bearing the consequences of failure away from elected government and towards a generic ‘system’ that has a life of its own. An emerging industry of accountants, technocrats, auditors and certifiers are the foot soldiers of this system, but bear no responsibility. Third, BEE is now based on such levels of complexity that it implicitly legitimizes ‘outsourcing’ of its management from government to the private (auditing) sector, thus reinforcing a further weakening of the state and facilitating a next round of ‘outsourcing’ of previously political and now managerialized functions. Finally, BEE managerialism is forwarding the idea that (some level of) redistribution is actually possible in a neo-liberal economic policy setting, thus disenfranchising more radical options in policy-making.

This paper presents data on guano production on the Namibian islands from 1843 to 1895, reconstructed from the nineteenth century customs records of the Cape Colony and United Kingdom. As the latter was the primary market for Namibian guano during this period, the data series can be considered to encompass the global production on the islands. Interpretation of the records as a proxy index for fish stock abundance is complicated by the interplay of cultural and environmental factors in influencing annual production. When compared with rainfall records from the Royal Observatory in Cape Town (1846- 1895), the guano data are suggestive of a relationship between guano production and environment, but firm conclusions must await better proxy records, perhaps based on fish scales in seafloor sediments off the Namibian coast.

This thesis deals with the history of the St Helena Bay inshore fisheries, 1856-1956. Fishing has long been neglected by social and economic historians and the myths propagated by company and popular writers still hold sway. The thesis challenges these by situating commercial fishing at St Helena Bay in the context of changing regional, national and international economies and showing how it was shaped and conditioned by the struggle for ownership of the marine resource between labour and capital, mediated by the state. The thesis is organised chronologically into three epochs. In each the focus moves from macro to micro, tracing the processes of class formation, capital accumulation and state intervention. The first epoch (c.1856-c.1914) examines the merchant fisheries, the second (c.1914-c.1939) the crayfish canning industry and the third ( c.1939-c.195) secondary industrialisation. It is argued that the common property nature of the marine resource and non-identity between labour and production time in fishing created obstacles to capitalist production, discouraging investment and allowing petty-commodity production to flourish. The latter mediated the vagaries of production through a share system of co-adventuring which enabled owners to avoid paying a fixed wage. This system's impact on the nature and consciousness of fishing labour is examined as is its vulnerability to capture by other capitals through insecure land tenure and credit. Fishing capital, in both its merchant and productive guises was dependent on articulation with petty-commodity production to provide it with commodities or raw material and bear the cost of reproducing labour. Articulation was hampered at St Helena Bay both by the persistence of merchant capital and the rent and labour interests of Sandveld agriculture. The origins and effect of this situation on the fisheries is detailed and discussed, highlighting the importance of agricultural capital's political influence with the colonial and provincial state in blocking or subverting the development of productive capital. The advent of the interventionist central state in the 1930s undermined merchant and farmer dominance of the fisheries and cleared the way for the articulation of petty-commodity primary production with secondary industry during and after the Second World War. This articulation was facilitated by the central state restricting access to the marine · resource and investing heavily in marine research and infrastructure to roll-back the natural constraints on fishing and create the conditions for the establishment of a stable capitalist production regime.

It has been suggested that nineteenth-century colonial states in South Africa exercised 'power without knowledge' and that 'archival government' was the product of a post-South African War alliance between the British administration and mining capital in the Transvaal. This argument privileges writing on paper as the only form of archival government. Yet the Cape Colony in the latter half of the nineteenth century used record systems founded instead on writing on skin. Paper registration had failed because there was no reliable way of linking paper identities with the human and animal skins they referred to. Faced with this problem, colonial officials resorted to using the older scheme of writing on the skins of people and animals. The resulting body marks were recorded and the registers or excerpts of registers were distributed in cheap printed form as archives enabling the reliable recognition of men and private property and of pedigree in livestock. This was the recognisable forerunner of twentieth-century registration systems of much greater reach and ambition that transcribed skin mechanically through photography and fingerprinting and so aspired to registering whole populations of people and animals.

This study examines the role played by traditional Xhosa religious belief and experience in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-57. Using a range of primary and secondary historical sources, this study focuses on the period between 1856 and 1857 where many of the amaXhosa slaughtered their cattle and ceased agricultural production. This study centres the work of South African historians in the analysis of the Cattle-Killing Movement and the prophecies of Nongqawuse. The study is framed by the conception of the movement as inherently religious in character and form. As such, certain elements of African and Xhosa religious beliefs form an important part of this study. The role of ancestors within Xhosa religious life, the spirits known as the ‘River People', the function of cattle in ritual sacrifice and the role of prophets and diviners in Xhosa life are all important in understanding the events of the Cattle-Killing Movement. Themes of rebirth and renewal are present within the prophecies and the wider movement. This study will argue that the religious aspects of the Cattle-Killing Movement have been given insufficient attention by materialists. This study seeks to address the problem of historians, and other scholars, studying the Cattle-Killing in disciplinary silos, favouring certain contributing factors while dismissing others. The prophecies of Nongqawuse were believed by the numerous participants because its content drew on past religious and mythological narratives that the Xhosa were familiar with and due to the adverse material circumstances of the mid-19th century. It will be shown that the Cattle-Killing Movement was determined by the lung sickness epidemic, other materialist and structuralist causes. However, just as importantly, it was determined by the religious beliefs and experiences of the believers.

This thesis is concerned with the invention of South African Anglo identity, and aims to provide a new perspective on how this identity was constructed in the Eastern Cape from c.1910 to 1965. In particular, it considers the ways in which the museum developed to construct South African Anglo identity in the Eastern Cape town of Grahamstown. In the nationalisms of the postcolonial states, independent countries possessed museums in their capitals. These institutions constituted an essential part of national heritage, were crucial for the advancement of education, and operated as a means through which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation state was itself curated and sustained. Postcolonial nationalisms are imagined through the grammar provided by empire. In other words, they are imagined in terms of the administrative and archaeological evidence that colonialism has ‘gathered’ and displayed in its museums. The visual representation of the artefact became a powerful signifier for national identity because of everyone’s awareness of its location in an infinite series of identical symbols. This thesis’s primary focus is on how South African Anglo identity was invented in two key sites in Grahamstown, namely, the school and the museum. It will illustrate how rifles, which were used by the cadet corps at St Andrew’s College, and which were carefully selected and displayed in the 1820 Settlers’ Memorial Museum’s Military Gallery, came to play a central role in symbolizing and militarizing Anglo identity in the eastern province in the twentieth century. In particular, this study will argue that although English identity was reinvented following the 1820 settlers’ centenary in Grahamstown, it was not imagined as a military identity until after the Second World War, and the return of the veterans to St Andrew’s College and the cadet corps. Importantly, it will indicate that the school and the museum comprised key sites through which South African Anglo identity was constructed to reflect images of the British soldier, who in the Eastern Cape, could adapt to local conditions.

With the potential for shale gas extraction in the Karoo region of South Africa, every effort must be undertaken to understand what the effects this transformative industry may have. This paper attempts to explore what effects the industry may have on "small" Karoo towns by creating a demographic and economic baseline for three towns in the region and compares this with a shale gas extraction future. This was grounded in sociological research based on the "Boomtown Model", which attempts to understand the effects extractive industries have on small towns. The thesis finds that small Karoo towns are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of the Boomtown Model, in light of their current profile which shows the rural economy has been declining for many years, which is coupled with a number of social issues that affect towns such as alcohol abuse and inter-personal violence. This paper concludes that a new shale gas industry will not benefit the residents of the Karoo unless a suitable policy framework is in place that ensures long term beneficiation and mitigates the environmental costs.

This dissertation examines the value of state assistance for small farmers in countries beset by capital deficits. It explores how undercapitalisation inhibited capitalist development of white commercial agriculture in South Africa between 1910 and 1936. From 1937, South Africa's nationalist government intervened in markets through marketing control boards to resolve capital constraints. Accumulation, liberal credit provision and investment followed. Between 1973 and 1981 state control over markets diminished. Nonetheless development continued. This thesis calls into contention the New Institutional Economic school's premise that state involvement should be limited to protecting institutions that optimise the free market. In their approach, protection of private property is the only path to sustainable economic development. The history of white agriculture in South Africa from 1910 demonstrates that state intervention that resolves capital deficits in the context of a competitive market economy is another sustainable path.

Includes abstract., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-217)., Sheep farmers who protested against the promulgation of anti-scab legislation presented their opinions of the disease in a slew of letters to the press and in testimonies before various scab commissions. Although the farmers' beliefs about scab were heterogeneous, they contained elements of an environmental theory of disease.

Bibliography: leaves 199-221.

Bibliography: leaves 163-172., This study explores changes in the way that Drum magazine constructed manhood from the first edition of 1951 to its sale in 1984. The exploration is undertaken from a feminist post modern perspective that sees gender as a social construct and masculinity as a complex and multifaceted identity that is actively and creatively produced by men in relation to women and through the intersections with other identities such as sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity. I argue that Drum's constructions of the masculinity of black men were infused with both black and white notions of race and sex, informed by both western and African discourses of gender. At times these different discourses were in competition, at other times they were more compatible; together they shaped the representations of manhood found in Drum, which in turn helped legitimise and normalise particular ways of being a man in mid to late twentieth century South Africa.

Bibliography: pages 83-94., This study investigates the tensions surrounding livestock enumeration in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. The study situates livestock statistics in an historical context which is intended to provide some indication of what these statistics meant for contemporary actors. This study looks at the significance of the enumeration oflivestock by the state, both for the state and for farmers, and focuses specifically on the semi-nomadic 'trekfarming' population ofthree districts of the Cape Colony - ClanwiHiam, Calvinia and Namaqualand - referred to for the purposes of this study as the North-western Cape. Livestock enumeration was considered a central component of the officially-sanctioned fund of 'knowledge' on the colony's livestock that was used as the basis of state policy and pastoral reform interventions. Livestock statistics were also a contentious issue in the colony during this period. While certain sectors of the inhabitants of the colony viewed statistics as an indispensable aspect of 'modern' life and put pressure on the colony's civil service to provide more reliable statistics, other sectors of the population viewed enumeration with suspicion. This thesis looks at the tensions surrounding agricultural statistics, and argues that this contest had its roots in the fact that statistics had come to be regarded as a symbol of the 'progressive' agriculture that was sweeping the colony during this period. Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of state knowledge on livestock throughout this period would prove to be constrained by the state's particular preoccupation with the growth of 'progressive' agriculture. Gaps existed in official knowledge on agriculture in the colony which would allow farmers in outlying regions such as the North-western Cape a degree of liberty in their farming practices and use of natural resources.