The exploitation of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth also increased socioeconomic stratification within the white settler population. The extraction of profit created a new set of mining conglomerates, such as De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded by Cecil Rhodes. While the British figured centrally in the mining interests of the region, Afrikaner settlers also participated in the mining sector. The emergence of a new economic elite, the Randlords, marked the emergence of a white elite that spanned the British-Afrikaner political divide. The white South African elite incorporated black South Africans into the global economy as manual laborers, shaping class structure across the region. The transnational mining sector that encompassed South Africa set pathways for disease transmission that were first highlighted by a black rural and urban tuberculosis epidemic, evidence of the growing disparity in health outcomes between white and black South Africans.
Socioeconomic stratification and increasingly unequal health outcomes were accompanied by the normalization of racial segregation across South Africa. Within the Afrikaner republics, racial segregation had marked social organization from the outset, with black South Africans restricted to settling in periurban areas. In British-controlled Cape Colony, urban segregation intensified in response to an outbreak of bubonic plague that had originated in Hong Kong. Growing international trade in the nineteenth century led to the increased movement of people, commodities, and pathogens, leading to racial segregation in colonial cities (Swanson 1977). Informed by miasmatic theories of disease, medical authorities utilized public health measures to implement racial segregation in colonial Cape Town and other cities across the European colonial empires. Black South Africans were designated as the source of disease, with their “unsanitary” residences, interspersed with white homes, designated as a threat to public health by medical authorities. Colonial authorities destroyed these homes, and black South Africans were moved against their will to racially defined urban areas. In Cape Town these measures were met with resistance by the black dockworkers and urban laborers who were forcibly removed from their homes. However, their protests did not prevent the deployment of public health concerns to create racially segregated urban spaces in Cape Town or elsewhere in South Africa.
A period marked by European expansion and colonial war set into motion institutional dynamics that presaged the intensified racial segregation during apartheid (Cook 1986). Through political, economic, and sociocultural processes, racial segregation and socioeconomic stratification transformed urban and rural areas in South Africa during the late colonial period.35 A native reserve system demarcated ethnically defined rural areas, establishing formal institutional roles for traditional elites and regulating the movement of black South Africans. Urban segregation was also extended across South Africa, predicated on a policy of “influx control” that regulated the movement of black South African laborers between the reserves and urban areas. The structural segregation established during the colonial period continued to mark South African society as British and Afrikaner polities united in the aftermath of the South African War, leading to further disenfranchisement of black South Africans.
Unified Rule, the ANC, and the White Welfare State
The social, political, economic, and institutional dynamics that emerged during the colonial period were carried forward with the unification of British and Afrikaner colonial polities. Unified white rule emerged in South Africa with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a white colonial compromise that was built on the expropriation of black South Africans. The power-sharing government of British and Afrikaner settlers reversed legislation that had granted limited citizenship rights to black South African during the late colonial period. For example, the Glen Grey Act (1894) had established limited citizenship rights for black South Africans within racially defined territories.36 However, the Natives Land Act (1913) reversed this policy by preventing land sales between white and black South Africans while formalizing expropriation, with 87 percent of the land set aside for white colonial settlers (WHO 1983). The exclusion of black farmers ended the emergence of a black South African peasantry and eliminated competition in the agricultural sectors since black South African farmers had generally outperformed their white counterparts with higher per-acre agricultural production (Bundy 1979). Black South African social formations, which constituted 70 percent of the country’s population, were left to carry out subsistence farming on poor quality farmland within densely settled reserves or seek out wage labor in the mines or in urban areas.37
Unified white rule was met with political resistance, most notably from the South African Native National Congress, which was established in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress in 1923.38 Early leaders of the party such as John Dube and Sol Plaatje led campaigns against legislation that formalized racial segregation and limited the citizenship rights of black South Africans, such as the Natives Land Act. Early ANC leaders came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds but shared certain characteristics, one of which was missionary education and English proficiency.39 Many early ANC members were Xhosa, reflecting their relatively early exposure to missionary education and British colonial rule. However, as Dale McKinley (1997) emphasizes, early ANC leaders were not necessarily focused upon a radical reorganization of South African society. Rather, they represented an emerging black South African professional class whose political and economic interests were undermined by unified white rule. Despite class differences between the ANC leadership and the majority of black South Africans, the party rose to prominence in the 1920s, campaigning against racial segregation and the continued expropriation of black South African land and resources.40
The onset of unified rule was accompanied by an expanded use of state institutions to secure the political and economic interests of white South Africans, including legislation to address the growing population of “poor whites.”41 Increasing numbers of white South Africans living in poverty undercut the logic of segregation, which was predicated on the supposed racial supremacy of Europeans. The union government set out to reestablish the link between race and class as the foundation for a bifurcated wage-labor system across South Africa. Transnational interests influenced the unity government’s policies, as the Carnegie Corporation funded a commission that addressed the “poor whites” question in South Africa (Willoughby-Herard 2015). The commission’s findings were used to rationalize institutional mechanisms to support the social welfare of white South Africans, despite growing social inequality and disease prevalence among black South Africans.42
The development of state-owned enterprises that disproportionately employed poor and working-class whites accompanied a welfare state that defined South African citizenship in racial terms. State-owned enterprises such as the Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom), and the Iron and Steel Corporation (Iscor) expanded white employment and contributed to industrial growth in South Africa. The developmental state created during the interwar period was buttressed by the expansion of a state-led industrialization of the South African economy (Freund 2013). The Afrikaner population was the primary beneficiary of the white welfare state, which transformed their class position and reinforced the link between race and class. The rise of an Afrikaner working class was accompanied by the establishment of institutions created by an Afrikaner elite that espoused Afrikaner cultural particularity and white nationalism (O’Meara 1983). The broederbond, an elite network of wealthy Afrikaner men, backed the development of Afrikaner nationalist ideology, which focused on black South African urbanization and the social instability that was believed to accompany this process. Inspired by racialist conceptions of social Darwinism, united by Calvinist beliefs, and informed by the memory of concentration camps, the National Party was formed in 1914 to secure the interests of South Africa’s Afrikaner population.
Industrialization and urban growth during the interwar period exacerbated contradictions in the white settler alliance that had held since the South African War. The development of a white industrial working class and urban economic expansion led to increased