Abstract:
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.
