ABSTRACT
This chapter is a contribution to the growing literature on state management of labour markets in South Africa. It argues that understanding the labour history of the period requires an examination of the transformation of the South African economy in its subcontinental context. The survival and intensification of the country’s coercive labour system, based on low-wage, oscillating migration, depended on the ability of the low-wage employers to tap the labour supply of the entire subcontinent. During these decades of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity (for whites), a modern industrial state began to emerge from a primitive, resource-based economy (Tables 1 and 2). With the expansion of white agriculture and the rapid growth of manufacturing, the annual output of both overtook the value of gold production (Figure 1). This was the more striking given that the gold industry itself experienced strong growth after 1932. As a result, labour demands (and complaints of chronic shortage) increased rapidly throughout the economy (Tables 1, 5 and 6).
