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THE SPINNING JENNY AND THE SORTING TABLE: E. P. THOMPSON AND WORKERS IN INDUSTRIALIZING EUROPE AND SOUTHERN AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

JOHN HIGGINSON
JOHN HIGGINSON*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts
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Abstract

The most compelling aspect of E. P. Thompson's work for labor historian of Southern Africa is his contention that class is a fluent group relationship or ‘happening’ – something workers do, in addition to what employers and the state impose upon them. However, by the 1970s, Thompson recognized that his earlier claim also had to resonate with other key assumptions about working class aspirations; especially the need of a shared group consciousness to be more meaningful for individuals than the laws of the state. The principal weakness of Thompson's for African historians, however, is the absence of a more explicit discussion about the demise of the English peasantry in his work.

Keywords

South Africasouthern Africalaborindustrialeconomicagriculture
Type
JAH Forum: E. P. Thompson in African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 19 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Joye Bowman, Mwangi wa Githinji, Bruce Laurie, Zhongjin Li, Toussaint Losier, Leonce Ndikumana, Traci Parker, and two anonymous readers for their invaluable suggestions. The remaining errors are my own. Author's email: [email protected]

References

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5 See E. P. Thompson's account of rural litigation in seventeenth-century Wiltshire: ‘“Rough music”: le charivari anglais’, 288.

6 See the chapter of Alan Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978) entitled ‘When England ceased to be a peasant society: Marx, Weber and the historians’, 34–61.

7 See Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972), 14, 118, and 226Google Scholar; see also Thompson, E. P., Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), 65–75 Google Scholar.

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12 Drawing on Amartya Sen, Diana Wylie rightly claims, ‘During their industrial revolution, black South Africans obtained only the most restricted “exchange entitlements”.’ Badly put, but correct nevertheless. See Wylie, D., Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (Charlottesville, 2001), 35–44 Google Scholar; see also Beinart, W. and Bundy, C., Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (Berkeley, 1987), 21–30, 142–4Google Scholar; see also Phimister, I. R., ‘Peasant production and underdevelopment in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1914’, African Affairs, 73:291 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darch, Colin, ‘Notas sobre fontes estatísticas ofíciais referentes à economia colonial Moçambicana: uma critíca geral’, Estudos Moçambicanos, 4 (1983–5), 103–25Google Scholar; Iliffe, J., ‘The organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion’, The Journal of African History, 8 (1967), 495–512 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crais, Poverty, War and Violence in South Africa, 67–121.

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33 See Native Grievances Committee, ‘Testimony of Stanley Archibald Markham Pritchard’, 26 Jan. 1914, before H. O. Buckle, Magistrates’ Court, Johannesburg, 2–3; see also Moodie, T. D., ‘Maximum average violence: underground assaults on the South African gold mines, 1913–1965’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31:3 (2005), 553–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 South African Industrial Federation (hereafter SAIN) AH 646, Bd 3.30, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, ‘Conference: Between Representatives of the Executive Committee of the Mining Department of the South African Industrial Federation and the Chamber of Mines … Thursday, 20th Dec. 1921’, 6; see also Rickard, T. A., ‘The strike on the rand’, Mining and Engineering Journal, 113:18 (1922), 757 Google Scholar.

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37 By the evening of 7 March 1922, and for at least a full week afterward, the corner of Sixteenth Street and Delarey Street in the Vrededorp section of Johannesburg became one of the most dangerous places in South Africa for a non-white person to be: See Anon., ‘Starting trouble: systematic attempts to provoke natives: important affidavits’, Sunday Times, 19 Mar. 1922; see also, SAIN AH 646, Bd 6.3.22, ‘Public Violence …’, 1922 (various testimonies).

38 Native Grievances Committee, ‘Testimony of Herman Melville Taberer’, 6 Feb. 1914, before H. O. Buckle, Magistrates’ Court, Johannesburg, 2–4.

39 See, for example, the correspondence of T. Holcomb, the American Ambassador to South Africa entitled ‘SA Communists on Trial, 6–20 January 1947’, Confidential: U. S. State Department Central Files, South Africa, 1945–1949 (Scholarly Resources).

40 See Berg, M., ‘What difference did women's work make to the industrial revolution’, History Workshop, 35 (1993), 30–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class, 194–5; Samuel Thorne Papers MS1193, folder 4, ‘The Mining Industry and the Economy of South Africa’, Sterling Library Special Collections, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

41 See Chakrabarty, D., Provincializing Europe (Chicago, 2000), 49–62 Google Scholar; see also Lewis, W. A., Growth and Fluctuation, 1870–1914 (Boston, 1965), 19–24 Google Scholar.

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43 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 191.

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56 Foucault, M., Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Volume I , ed. Rainbow, Paul (New York, 1994), 15–35 Google Scholar. For example, E. Picard, a petit bourgeois member of the Parti Ouvrier Belge, was quick to blame ‘foreign elements’ such as the Senegalese railway workers who, from his vantage point, were subverting indigenous Congolese workers by example because of their discussions of rights and the political franchise: See Picard, Edmond, En Congolie (Bruxelles, 1896), 93–4Google Scholar.

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58 See AG 2738, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Sharecropping and Tenancy Project, ‘Interview with Mr. M. Moloko [interviewer: Mr. B. Moeketsi]’, Sekama/ Mathopestad, Boons, 20-11-79, Tape Numbers 78A/B and 79A/B; see also ‘Interview with Mrs. R. M. Mogoai [interviewer: M. S. S. Ntoane], 884 Ikageng Location, Pochefstrom, 06-11-1979, Tape Number 72 A/B.

59 See AG 2738, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Sharecropping and Tenancy Project, ‘Interview with Mr. Joe Mahlako [interviewer: M. M. Molepo]’, Tape 81, Aa 14.

60 See Higginson, J., Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (New York, 2015), 187–90Google Scholar; see also van Onselen, C., ‘The witches of suburbia’, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914, Volume II: The New Nineveh (New York, 1982), 1–73 Google Scholar.

61 Lloyd, ‘Africa and Hobson's imperialism’, 137–8.

62 After years of research and surveying African mineworkers at Anglo Platinum, Nhlanhla Thwala concluded that more than 60 per cent of the workers at Anglo Platinum would support the banning of Fanakalo at the workplace. Moreover, 40 per cent of them believed that Fanakalo was the source many of fatal accidents on the mines: See N. Thwala, ‘The mining sector in South Africa and the search for a workplace language: is Fanakalo still relevant in South Africa?’, Articles on Language: Wits Language School (1 Jul. 2008), 1–4 (http://www.witslanguageschool.com/NewsRoom/ArticleView/).

63 See E. P. Thompson's, ‘Outside the whale’, in Thomson, E. P. (ed.), The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 25 Google Scholar.