ABSTRACT
Henry Rider Haggard’s depiction of phenomenal riches concealed within a sexualized African landscape in his breakthrough novel King Solomon’s Mines has been variously taken to support and contest vested economic interests at a time of expanding British imperial infl uence and developing commodity culture. Published in 1885, the same year that the Berlin Conference formalized European colonial intentions in Africa, Haggard’s romance for “big and little boys” (38) for all its apparent otherworldliness is an unavoidably political text, as a signifi cant body of criticism has established. The discovery of diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold in 1885 transformed the region, in Laura Chrisman’s words, “from a service station en route to India to a global centre of industrial production” (23). King Solomon’s Mines, for Chrisman, is both a response to and a rewriting of “the narrative of modern capitalism in South Africa” that “mythologize[s] imperial history and its extraction of mineral wealth” (24). As such, Haggard’s novel operates, in Anne McClintock’s words, as a “disavowal of the origins of money in labour” (257) through which historical processes are transfi gured into a mythic imaginary that evades meaningful engagement with empire’s material impacts.
