IRSH 63 (2018), pp. 29–61 doi:10.1017/S0020859017000669 © 2018 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Capital, Market, and Labour in the Western Cape Winelands c.1900: Agricultural Capitalism?* L ARS O LSSON Professor Emeritus of History at Linnaeus University and Visiting Professor at Malmö University, Sweden E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: This article is a case study of the political economy of the Western Cape Winelands c.1900. The analysis covers three intertwined processes that were crucial for the advance of a capitalist mode of production: the making of capital, the making of a com- modity market, and the making of a labouring class. The making of capital was achieved after the mid-1800s. However, even at the end of the century, the market for Cape wines and the making of a labouring class remained obstacles to the advance of capitalism. Some wealthy farm owners, though, were about to overcome these obstacles. A small group of them were of old Afrikaner origin, while others, mostly investor capitalists of British origin, were quite successful in establishing a capitalist mode of production on their wine farms. In particular, drawing on a vast array of primary sources, we discuss the many labour recruitment programmes that were organized as private and state initiatives. INTRODUCTION The Western Cape of South Africa is one of the best-known regions in the world for wine farming. The cultivation and production of wine was initi- ated soon after the Dutch East India Company gained a foothold in the Cape peninsula in the mid-1600s and Europeans first settled there. Wine was produced both for the crews of the ships en route to India, Batavia, and China and back to Europe, and for consumption in the expanding colony. For many years, wine farming developed very slowly, but it expanded significantly after the British occupation in the early 1800s owing to wine now being exported to England on favourable conditions.1 Cape wine was * The research for this article has been funded by the Swedish Research Council’s division for Development Research. I would like to thank Fredrik Lilja, Ulla Rosén, Jonas Sjölander, two anonymous reviewers, and the IRSH editors Angelie Sens and Aad Blok for their most valuable comments on the text. Ulla Rosén made me aware of the existence of the article by Eric Hobs- bawm that inspired this study. The staff at the JS Gericke Library in Stellenbosch and the National Library in Cape Town were most helpful. 1. Mary Isabel Rayner, “Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806–1834” (Ph.D., Duke University, 1986), ch. 2 [JS Gericke Biblioteek: Africana. Stellenbosch University]. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 22:25:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000669 30 Lars Olsson needed for the crews following the establishment of “a strong military and naval force at the Cape” in 1813, and the British government introduced “preferential tariffs on Cape wines” in Britain after the Napoleonic wars.2 However, the “sweet times” for wine farmers lasted only a decade and, according to Pamela Scully, they rapidly showed “the potential for turning sour”. In Britain, a reduction of duties on European wines and an oversupply of, often, bad-quality Cape wines resulted in falling demand and lower prices on the British market. In addition, slavery, which was the labour base for wine production in the Western Cape, was abolished in 18343 and farmers had to find “free” labourers to work for them instead. In 1861, the British govern- ment’s abolition of the “preferential duties” on colonial wine brought about the collapse of the British market for the Western Cape wine farmers.4 Never- theless, wine farming expanded: the number of wine farmers increased from 688 in 1875 to 1,599 in 1904; the number of vines increased from 69,910,215 in 1875 to no less than 134,354,621 in 1904; and, despite the disastrous phylloxera epidemic in the late 1880s,5 the volume of wine produced increased from 4,485,665 gallons in 1875 to 5,686,671 gallons in 1904. Although the districts of Paarl and Stellenbosch remained the centre of wine farming, the Winelands also expanded beyond, into Malmesbury, Robertson, and Worcester. Additionally, as all but six wine farmers in 1875 and all but ten in 1904 were registered as “European or White”,6 wine farming was controlled by Whites. It is remarkable that so little research has been done on the expansion of wine farming in the Western Cape at the end of the nineteenth century. Hermann Giliomee and Scully seem to be the only scholars who have focused on that transformative period, but neither of them says very much about the mode of production that was practised. Giliomee notes that, despite the collapse of the British market, wine making was “the largest provider of work in the Western Cape” by 1880. But “the whole agricultural industry” was “languishing in consequence of the bad supply of labour” due to the low 2. D.J. van Zyl, Vineyards and Wine and History (Stellenbosch, 1987). 3. The Slavery Abolition Act ended slavery in the Cape officially in 1834, but, though officially freed, the slaves were still bonded to their old masters for four years under a system of “apprenticeship”. 4. Pamela Scully, The Bouquet of Freedom: Social and Economic Relations in the Stellenbosch District, South Africa, c.1870–1900 (Cape Town, 1990), pp. 3–4. 5. Van Zyl, Vineyards and Wine and History, p. 39. 6. Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1875 (Cape Town, 1877), Part IX – Occu- pations of the People, p. 185, Table IV; ibid., Part IX – Land, Crops, Livestock, Pastoral Products, Agricultural Machines, and Industries Connected with Agriculture, Table III, Land under Cultivation, p. iv; Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1904 (Cape Town, 1905), Part VII – Occupations of the People, pp. 342–345, Table IX, Occupations of the People in Detail: General Summary; Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1904 (Cape Town, 1906), Part X – Livestock and Agriculture, pp. 508–509, Table XI, Extent of Land Cultivated: Workers on Farms: Census Districts. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 22:25:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000669 Capital, Market, and Labour in the Western Cape Winelands c.1900 31 wages and the “ill-treatment of farm workers” by farmers. Only some of “the wealthiest wine and wheat farmers” were successful by exploiting “a system of tied rent to secure a stable labour force”. Farmers had to “compete in the wider and diversified economy created by the expanding capitalist sector”, but according to Giliomee wine farming was not part of the capitalist economy.7 Scully, instead, claims that wine farmers developed and gradually involved WesternCapewinefarmingin“the spread and intensification of capitalist relations” at the end of the century. She is, however, somewhat ambiguous in defining capitalism. On the one hand, she agrees with Robert Ross, Mary I. Rayner, and Nigel Worden when she concludes that there was “a capitalising elite within the dominant class in the Western Cape” during slavery and that “farmers in the South Western Cape became part of an increasingly hegemonic capitalist economy” as early as the late eighteenth century.8 She adds that wine farmers were seriously concerned about “access to markets, to labour and to the source of capital”.9 However, she does not explore these concerns. On the other hand, Scully hints that Ross, who does not say much about wine farming after the abolition of slavery in 1834, “exaggerate[s] the extent to which capitalist relations had penetrated the South African countryside prior to the mineral discoveries”. While Ross argues that agriculture in the colony was “unmistakeably capitalist in character” in the Western Cape during slavery and long before the start of the mining industry,10 Scully claims that “[t]he data for Stellenbosch supports” the conclusion that “even in the 1920s only a minority of South African farmers could be described as capitalist”. Most farmers did not keep record books, nor did they “invest in machinery or in intensified use of their land”, she maintains.11 Certainly, that might be an indication that, around 1900, most wine farmers were not capitalists, and they obviously did not concern themselves with the accu- mulation of capital. Scully does not, however, clarify in what sense Western Cape wine farming on large farms was or was not capitalist in nature. 7. Hermann Giliomee, “Western Cape Farmers and the Beginnings of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1870–1915”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14:1 (1987), pp. 38–63, 39f, and 47. 8. Scully, Bouquet of Freedom, pp. v and 17; Robert Ross, “The Origins of Capitalist Agriculture in the Cape Colony: A Survey”, in William Beinart, Peter Delius, and Stanley Trapido (eds), Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa 1850–1930 (Braamfontein, 1986), pp. 56–100; Rayner, “Wine and Slaves”; Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985). For a discussion of agricultural capitalism in Eastern Cape, see for instance Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville, VA, 1996); Fredrik Lilja, The Golden Fleece of the Cape: Capitalist Expansion and Labour Relations in the Periphery of Transnational Wool Production c.1860–1950 (Uppsala, 2013), ch.