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In the wake of the South African war, the indenture and transport of over 63,000 Chinese men to gold mines in the Transvaal sparked a rush to supply smoking opium to a literally captive market. Embroiled in a growing political economy of mass intoxication, state lawmakers shifted official policy from prohibition to provision. Their innovation of an industrial drug maintenance bureaucracy, developed on behalf of mining capital in alliance with organized pharmacy and medicine, ran counter to local trends of policy reform and represents a unique episode for broader histories of modern narcotics regulation. This article considers the significance of this case and chronicles the contradictory interests and ideologies that informed political scrambles over legitimate opium uses, users, and profiteers. It shows how the state maintained its provision policy, for as long as it proved expedient, against varied and mounting public pressures – local and international – for renewed drug suppression. The argument here is that the state managed an epidemic of addiction on the Rand as an extraordinary problem of demography. It achieved this both through redefining smoking opium from intoxicant to mine medicine and through the legal construction of a ‘special biochemical zone’, which corresponded with the exceptional status and spatial segregation of a despised alien labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in failing to include the Khoesan population, previous estimates have overestimated slave productivity, social inequality, and the level of gross domestic product in the Cape Colony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Investigates the role of the state in promoting and/or facilitating development needs interrogation in the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC), an economic development program in South Africa. Genealogy of the MDC; Objectives and governance mechanisms; Promotion of globalization.

Examines the rural economy in the wake of the emancipation of slaves in the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Argument on the effect of the abolition of slavery in the history of the Cape Colony; Options of the freed slaves in negotiating the price of labor and conditions of work; Maintenance of insolvency by the former slaveowners and the impact of farming on their livelihood.

Presents an abstract of a conference paper on monopsony, land tenure and the expansion of settlement in South Africa from 1652 to 1795.