ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolving national space economy. The evolving nature of the South African economy and the distribution of wealth and power have ensured the marginal or peripheral status of the province. The persistence of spatial and economic inequalities in the study region, largely inherited from a legacy of disempowerment, discrimination and confinement, requires new forms of intervention, such as Local Economic Development. In the pre-industrial period and after the first colonial incursions in the seventeenth century, the economy was dominated by mercantile and agricultural activity which was focused in the primary colonial settlements on the coast, namely Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban. The introduction of the capitalist economy in the Eastern Cape involved a redefinition of terms of access to the basic means of production, namely land. The most drawn out colonial confrontation in South Africa was over the so-called ‘Eastern Cape’ frontier, which was a true moving frontier of conquest and subjugation in the American sense.
