Labour, capital and the state in the St. Helena Bay fisheries c.1856 - c.1956

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

More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 October 1992An emerging environmental history in South Africa has so far focused exclusively on terrestrial environments and their human-resource interactions (land, game, forests) (1). In so doing it has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist and social history of the past two decades and careful to locate environmental issues in the broader social, economic and political context-of an emerging capitalism in Southern Africa. No attempt has yet been made, however, to extend the scope of this endeavour to encompass the marine resource and recent environmental literature on the subject still evidences a strong present-mindedness which strongly detracts from its analysis (2). The marine environment is innately hostile to capitalism, except in its petty or merchant forms, by virtue of its common property status and susceptibility to a range of "natural factors" which disrupt production (3). For productive capitalism to succeed in such a hostile environment, it needs to be able to limit the effects of both these factors on accumulation in order to justify investment. In South Africa this was achieved after 1945 through large-scale central state intervention, assuming ownership of the resource and conferring de facto private property rights on private exploiters and lessening the effect of "natural factors" on production through the provision of infrastructure and marine research (4). Prior to this, capital's successful exploitation of the marine resource was fundamentally dependent on untrammelled access, relying on the sure abundance of the latter to compensate for the detractions of non-ownership and the vagaries of weather and resource. These constraints also made marine resources a low development priority alongside mining and agriculture and saw them relegated to the realm of the regional maritime state which was too weak exercise effective ownership, confer ownership rights on capital or mediate the effects of natural factors on production. The Cape colonial etate concentrated its efforts on developing deep sea trawling, but after 1910 the provincial state confined itself to the "preservation" of fish and game

A reconstruction of the Cape (South African) fur seal harvest 1653 - 1899 and the comparison with the 20th-century harvest

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

Historicising perceptions and the national management framework for invasive alien plants in South Africa

Abstract: This article offers a historical framework for understanding changes to human perceptions and efforts to manage invasive alien plants and weeds in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The article argues that South African legislation and policy for managing invasive alien plants and weeds has historically been limited because people have held contradictory values about plants, many private land owners have lacked resources and have not been compelled to follow government legislation, and because policy has reflected the interests of a small group of farmers or scientific experts who have had limited influence on most private land owners and traditional land users. Successful control efforts often relied on technical expertise that was applied controversially or could be implemented on government land without extensive public consultation or social conflict. The creation of a national framework for invasive alien plants through the Working for Water Programme in 1995 and National Environmental Management of Biodiversity Act (no. 10) of 2004 (NEMBA) has increased public awareness, but the Programme and NEMBA remain limited by many of the same institutional and social constraints that experts and institutions faced in the past. In conclusion, the article draws on history to provide insights to contemporary challenges

Historical reconstruction of guano production on the Namibian islands

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

'The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World': Environmental Determinism in Erin Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911 - 1936

The article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise ignores his scholarship which is now deemed irredeemably Eurocentric, empiricist and conservative. By relocating and re-reading Walker in the context of the first quarter century of the new settler nation state confected by Britain out of the wreckage of the South African War, the supposed disciplinary dead-end of his scholarship becomes the route into an examination of historical knowledge as both construct of and aide memoir to the new imaginary of white South African nationhood. It also provides a salutary warning to the modern practitioners of environmental history of the non-innocence of their field and the need to reckon with its determinist past

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it": comparing fisheries reforms in South Africa

The paper argues that the reduction of history to "apartheid" has hamstrung efforts to reform the South African fisheries since 1994, by privileging race over class and state. The salience of the latter in the maintenance and reproduction of endemic inequality is demonstrated by a comparison of the current reform process with that in the 1940s. This reveals a series of striking similarities and shows how the initial redistribution agenda in both instances was subverted in favour of a consolidation of monopoly capital and state control over the marine commons.South Africa Apartheid Fishing Fisheries reform Redistribution