Geohistory, Capitalist Development, and South Africa

Thirty years after apartheid was overthrown in South Africa, the country is on the verge of becoming a “failed state” – supposedly due to its internal contradictions. Geohistory, Capitalist Development, and South Africa shows that this isn’t the full story.

South African history cannot be explained in isolation from developments in the rest of the world. Nor can it be understood in terms of change from a regime where race seemed all-determining, to one where race is supposed to be a matter of indifference. Rather, this book argues that the key to understanding South Africa lies in the logics of capitalist development. These explain why capitalist domination has taken racial forms, and why global conditions have been so important.

Kevin R. Cox was born in England and taught at The Ohio State University for fifty years. His books include Making Human Geography (The Guilford Press, 2014) and The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception (Syracuse University Press, 2016).

ISBN: 9798888907832

Publication date: July 1, 2026

Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Preface x

1 Capitalist Development, Geohistory and the Peculiarities

of South Africa 1

1 South Africa’s Peculiarity 3

2 Putting South Africa in Context 7

3 South Africa and the Global Political Economy 9

2 Creating ‘A Country’ 17

1 Introduction 17

2 The First Globalization and South Africa 20

3 An Institutional Fix for Gold 23

3.1 The Challenges 23

3.2 The Fix 25

3.3 Labor’s Racial Hierarchy 31

3 Apartheid and Giving New Life to ‘South Africa’ 38

1 Introduction 38

2 The Context 39

3 Apartheid 46

4 An Assessment 56

4 In the Eye of the Storm and the End of the Beginning 62

1 Introduction 62

2 From the Golden Years to the Long Downturn 65

3 ‘Globalization’ 71

4 Confronting Decolonization 77

5 Interregnum 84

5 Decolonizing South Africa: A Hiding to Nothing 91

1 Introduction 91

2 An Audit of the New South Africa 92

2.1 Race and Material Conditions 92

2.2 The Skills Problem 97

2.3 Transitioning the State 103

3 South Africa and the International Division of Labor 107

viii Contents

3.1 ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Globalizations 109

3.2 The Neo-liberal Project 116

6 Zim- Lite? 120

1 Context 120

2 The Symptoms 121

2.1 Infrastructural Collapse 121

2.2 Social (Dis)Order 123

2.3 ‘Exit’ 126

3 Towards an Explanation 127

References 143

Index 150