about the consequences of allowing blacks to gain control of the rural economy are to be understood rather than taken at face value, we need to uncover the social realities underlying the rhetoric. This paper, then, is concerned on one level to examine the complex relationship between state action on the one hand, and social reality on the other, in the transformation of the countryside in early industrial South Africa. The specific focus of this paper in this respect in on the 1913 Natives Land Act, the most closely studied law in South Africa's history and historiography. The study focuses on the white-settled rural hinterland of the Witwatersrand, the industrial hub of southern Africa, incorporating the northern and eastern Orange Free State and the southernmost districts of the Transvaal. For it was in the most advanced heartland of the arable highveld that the 1913 Act had its most immediate resonance in the transformation of rural relations. The paper also investigates the dynamics behind the development of a capitalist agriculture, particularly the cyclical, unsustained pattern evident in the drive for accumulation and control of productive resources by whites. Only at certain periods of financial boom and productive expansion, as we shall see, did racial antagonisms and competition for resources reach critical intensity. It seems that only under certain transitory and recurrent material circumstances did the underlying antagonistic forces at work rise to the surface of popular consciousness, resulting in a much more explicit resort to force and state power. At such times there arose a .rural heightened awareness among/whites of the urgency of concerted action and state intervention if whites were to establish dominance over the rural economy. The implied goal was the establishment of capitalist agriculture based on black wage labour; but this was not a practical possibility in the early twentieth century. It was the extension of white control over black labour, time, capital, skills and produce that was sought, and not
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