Commerce,class and ethnicity: Cape Town at the advent of the mineral revolution (c.1875)

This paper is about economic activity, social structure and ethnicity in the Cape Town of the 1870s. In an attempt to combine quantative methodology with insight gained from written records, I have made extensive use of the Census of1875. Cape Town in that year displayed many similarities with Stedman Jones’ Outcast London. In both cities economic power lay with “those whose income derived from rent, banking and commerce.” Seasonality of production, types of casual occupations and a strong artisanal sector characterised both labour markets. Units of production were small. There was in both cities a notable absence of one of Marx and Engels’ fundamental classes, the industrial proletariat. Instead, amongst a sea of casual labour there was the strong presence of the self‐employed resisters of proletarianisation. I have attempted to show how the white ethnicity of dominant class consciousness both conformed to, and confirmed, class position. This white ethnicity differed from white racism in that it did not condemn people it defined as “Other than White” to perpetual inferiority or cultural difference. The nature of economic activity in the city, together with the reality of both white and coloured? Capetonians in almost all gradations of the under classes, made a rigidly ethnically ordered society or ethnically hierarchical division of labour unlikely.