South Africa's Current Transition in Temporal and Spatial Context

This article analyses South Africa’s current postapartheid transition in the light of earlier transformations of its social and economic order. The first of these prior transformations is the abolition of slavery and the shift to liberal capitalism, which took place in the early nineteenth century. The second is the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of these transformations, as well as the current transition, is explained as being partly the outcome of a broad shift in capitalist practice, innovated in the metropoles of the global economy. Due to South Africa’s situation within global economic networks, each of these shifts, at different times, raised the threat of a dislocation in South Africa’s prevailing social order. However, each prior transformation and, it will be argued, the current transition, has been ‘managed’ by established elites so as to ensure minimal change to the overall distribution of privilege. This conservative ‘management’ of shifts in capitalist practice, it is suggested, has been facilitated through South African elites’ historic engagement with cultural discourses circulating across a global terrain. In this article then, contemporary South Africa is located within both material and discursive networks which have historically influenced the country’s distribution of privilege.