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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Criminality and Conflict in Rural Stellenbosch, South Africa, 1870-1900 |
Author: | Scully, Pamela F. |
Year: | 1989 |
Periodical: | The Journal of African History |
Volume: | 30 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 289-300 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | labour relations offences agricultural history History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Economics and Trade Labor and Employment |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/183069 |
Abstract: | This article examines how notions of domination and reciprocity were played out in the winegrowing district of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in the last three decades of the 19th century. Stellenbosch farmers had to confront, for the first time since emancipation, the implications of the proletarianization of the underclass of the Western Cape. In the context of an expanding economy and diversified labour market, labourers left, or threatened to leave, farm employment. Farmers now recognized that the control and power which they had exercised over labourers was a matter of open conflict. The criminal records of the Resident Magistrate provide the lens through which the article examines the changing dynamics of labour relations on the farms in Stellenbosch between 1870 and 1900. A comparative perspective helps to inform the analysis of the meaning of theft, arson and assault in rural Stellenbosch. For a time labourers were able to exploit a measure of leverage against the farmers, but this was not to last, and by the early 1900s the tide had again turned in favour of the dominant class. Notes, ref. |