| This dissertation demonstrates that although indentured Chinese labor was a small and short-lived labor force in South Africa's gold mining industry, the presence of these laborers from 1904 to 1910 compels a rethinking of history, race, and apartheid and how to construct the contradictions and ambiguities that form South African society. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the nature of the historical lacuna around indentured Chinese labor in the secondary literature while it develops a historiography of writings on South Africa's making. It suggests rethinking South Africa historically, through geographies of connections or a networked account, to re-imagine space, place, and identity. This means that space, place, and identity are always already part of broader and long-term relations and processes. The movements of peoples, capital, and ideas that are explored in this study map a history that aims to make these laborers comprehensible in the historical development of the European capitalist world-system and, more specifically, to the transformation of South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War (1899--1902). Using primary documents from South Africa's National Archives, libraries, and museums this study reveals how the discourses of support and opposition to Chinese labor in South Africa and in Britain not only provide a specific lens for us to view the continued struggle between capital and labor in South Africa, but also reveal the relevance of racial politics in the efforts to reassert white political and economic dominance or to establish a "white man's country" in this new British colony. The anxieties and racism among socially and economically insecure Englishmen and Boers are discussed at length, shedding light on how the threat of Chinese labor competition, resistances among this labor force, and their exclusion contributed to the forging of white self-identity vis-a-vis black people. These findings suggest that, extending well beyond the measurable economic impact, the visibility and invisibility of these Chinese laborers was central to the hypervisibility of the notion of race structure organized by white domination of black people. What follows is a history of foreign labor mobilization and contestations in South Africa and across the British Empire in the age of empire. |
