Region formation under crisis conditions: South vs Southern Africa in the interwar period

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In recent years considerable attention has been paid in Africa to the promotion of economic growth through regional economic associations. Yet little scholarship exists on the historical formation of southern Africa as an existing ‘region’. This essay explores this subject by analysing conflicts between local political actors over regional economic relationships in the first half of this century. Examining the period as a whole reveals a critical transition during the interwar period. If at the beginning of the century southern Africa was marked by relatively free flows of commodities, labour and capital, by the late 1930s this situation was dramatically transformed. South Africa had become an industrialising power, while the free trade zone so assiduously cultivated by colonial and settler power in the previous half century had been shattered. At the same time, strongly interdependent and inherently unequal relationships emerged across the economic landscape of southern Africa for the first time. Several characteristics of the interwar conjuncture stimulated and promoted this process. Early interwar crises in the markets for southern Africa's exports triggered a dramatic challenge to long‐standing assumptions regarding the benefits of primary production. The South African state's response in the mid‐1920s, namely the initiation of the localization of industrial production, subsequently ruptured longstanding agreements among the territories of southern Africa. The Great Crash and its effects, in turn, only served to further exacerbate conflict between settler and colonial powers. The tracking of these conflicts and their historical outcomes indicates that no simple, linear historical process of the creation of a regional economic formation has taken place in southern Africa as is commonly presumed. Far from a simple strengthening of South African dominance occurring, the emergence of centre‐hinterland linkages in southern Africa was effected by the conscious pursuit of the ending of one set of trans‐territorial economic relationships and their replacement by another. In this instance, at least, a ‘region’ emerged not out of South‐South co‐operation, but out of the South African state's drive to escape southern Africa's hitherto shared fate as an open peripheral zone of the world economy.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: