The “labour aristocracy” in the early 20th-century South Africa

Introduction

Academic history emerged within the context of the western university in the 19th century and became closely connected to the idea of western nation-building. Its disciplinary Eurocentrism developed “at a time when Europe was acting as the global powerhouse, with imperialism as its ideological rationale” (Herren, Rüesch, & Sibille, 2012, p. 18). This is also true for a labour history that combined methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism since its emergence in the same century. As van der Linden (2008) argues,

historians studied the history of the working classes and workers’ movements in nation-states in Europe and North America as separate developments, and if they paid attention to social classes and movements in other parts of the world, these were interpreted according to ‘North-Atlantic’ schemes. (p. 3)

Along the same lines, Burawoy (2012) suggests that “the real battle is…appropriating, reordering and reconstructing” theories “in new contexts” (p. 212) with emphasis on the importance of particularizing and even expanding Northern theory for the development of a “Sociology of the South” (Burawoy, 2010, p. 22). Concerned with how to overcome the boundaries erected by mainstream theories, von Holdt (2012a) suggests “putting Western theory through the grinder” of the South African context, “probing and reconstructing it in a way that helps us to understand our own world and name it afresh” (p. 6). Von Holdt (2012b) also argues elsewhere that “it may be more productive to think of southern theory formation as a process of engagement, critique, and transformation of Western theory from a southern perspective, than as a process of alternative and autonomous theory formation.” He goes on to say that “Such engagement constitutes a double process of both enriching analysis of a society of the global South, and challenging and transforming Western theory” (p. 1).

In light of these remarks, this paper explores labour aristocracy in early 20th-century South Africa, going beyond traditional theoretical, conceptual, and territorial boundaries. To achieve this aim, the paper brings together insights from adjacent disciplines that are useful in the development of global labour history (van der Linden, 2008). The first part introduces the notion of labour aristocracy as understood through mainstream theoretical approaches and identifies some of its core aspects. The second part goes beyond entrenched traditional conceptual boundaries by demonstrating how the definition of the labour aristocracy in South Africa could be different from those that pertained to Europe, and how a local aspect, race relations, could be integrated into the debate on labour aristocracy, which has mainly been explained on the basis of class relations. The third part goes beyond traditional territorial boundaries by reflecting on the call of van der Linden (2008) for “transnational – and indeed the transcontinental – study of labour relations and workers’ movements” (p. 6). Van der Linden considers studying migrants as one of the core blocks on which to build transnational connections. As he explains, “migrants can impart their experiences to other workers in the country of settlement.…Their presence in the new country may cause segmentation of its labour markets, which might in turn lead to forms of ethnically segregated action” (p. 375). Accordingly, this final part explores mainly the international mobility of Cornish miners and Chinese migrant labour in order to build transnational connections in the explanation of the racism within the white working classes in the early 20th-century British Empire.

The notion of labour aristocracy

As Post (2010) explains, “the notion of labour aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working class conservatism and reformism” (p. 3). It is a concept “referring to an upper and favoured stratum of the manual working class,” and it forms the basis for numerous Marxist explanations of working-class activity in Victorian (1837–1901) and Edwardian (1901–1910) Britain, including the years up to the First World War (Moorhouse, 1978, p. 61). It is a key concept in the (Marxist) understanding of “the un-making of the British working class – as far as any quick, heroic, revolutionary role was concerned” (Moorhouse, 1978, p. 61). This expression was “applied to the highly-skilled and (consequently) strongly-unionised stratum of the working class that was economically, socially and politically allied to the middle class of the time” (Waterman, 1975, p. 57).

Linder (1985) states that no author prior to Lenin referred so frequently to the notion of labour aristocracy as Ernest Jones, who was a key figure in the Chartist movement and known to be “one of Marx and Engels’ closest British political friends” (p. 37). He believed that the skilled artisans, receiving superior wages and organizing under trades, formed the aristocracy of labour. He was convinced that the unionism of these trades had weakened the democratic and socialist movements by destroying working-class unity. As Waterman (1975) notes, “in 1858 Engels referred to the English proletariat as ‘becoming more and more bourgeois’ and in 1892 to the skilled artisans in the ‘great Trades Unions’ as forming an ‘aristocracy among working class’” (pp. 57–8). Engels’s original contribution was to postulate for the first time “the existence of a ‘special form of the labour aristocracy’, comprising an entire national working class,” the English proletariat, and “to point out England’s world market position as its source” of sustenance (Linder, 1985, p. 45).

Lenin developed further this notion during the First World War in his work on imperialism, linking imperialism and colonial super-profits with the labour aristocracy and arguing that these profits made possible a chain of bribes from labour ministers to labour officials. This also led to a trade union consciousness marked by a narrow economism which essentially accepted the basic framework of capitalism.¹ Following Lenin, Hobsbawm (1968, 1970) argued that imperialism and its super-profits combined with a changing technology and occupational structure to dislodge the labour aristocracy from its privileged position as a special stratum of the working class. The labour aristocracy emerges, in Hobsbawm’s (1970) view,

when the economic circumstances of capitalism make it possible to grant significant concessions to its proletariat, within which certain strata of workers manage by means of their special scarcity, skill, strategic position, organizational strength, etc. to establish notably better conditions for themselves than the rest. (p. 208)

Another approach to labour aristocracy comes from Foster (1974), who stressed authority at work, not high wages, as the key determinant of the labour aristocracy. According to Moorhouse (1978), Foster argued “that the labour aristocracy should be seen as the more or less conscious creation of British bourgeoisie, a device…to contain and control upsurges of working-class radicalism” (p. 64). Foster’s explanation was based on social control that was crucial for the bourgeoisie to maintain its class dominance. This new system of social control was achieved in the industrial organization by the creation of a “privileged grade within the labour force,” namely, supervisory “taskmasters and pacemakers” that constituted a labour aristocracy (Moorhouse, 1978, p. 64).

Hinton (1965) saw labour aristocrats as “a socially and politically articulated group distinct from the rest of the working-class” and located at the forefront of the labour movement owing to its economic and social privileges (p. 57). The growing structural conflict of interests between the aristocrats and the mass of workers reflected the politics of the working class in the mid-Victorian period, which became very much the politics of the labour aristocracy (Hinton, 1973). Gray (1976) maintained that these upper strata of the working class largely defined the aspirations of the labour movement in this particular period. The features of such an elite were the development of, firstly, a social identity which could be explained on the basis of community, patterns of housing, participation in voluntary associations, etc., and, secondly, its domination of the institutions of the labour movement. Gray (1976) argued that labour aristocracy heavily influenced the moderation of the Labour Party, and that the main reason why the labour leaders tended to be reformist, having a moderate and accommodative outlook, was the general hegemonic ideology in Victorian Britain and the absence of any strongly articulated counter-ideology.

As evinced from the foregoing, it is widely accepted that the notion of labour aristocracy is an ambiguous construct. Waterman (1975) noted that “‘labour aristocrats’ could apparently be either the working class as a whole, a section of the working class proper (skilled artisans), other wage earners (clerks), members of certain unions, a trade union or labour leaders” (p. 58). Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some core aspects attributed to the labour aristocracy across these divergent perspectives. In addition to the studies of the British case, Linder’s (1985) study of continental European aristocracies, and of the respective American and South African cases, identified skill as the common and essential trait of all national labour aristocracies. The peculiar position, role, privileges, and power of national labour aristocracies rested on the possession and control of relatively complex manual industrial skills. Linder (1985) further argued that

although this skill-base in some instances coincided or overlapped with ethnic (Austria-Hungary), racial (South Africa), religious (Ireland) or regional (Italy) proximate sources of working class divisiveness, the latter functioned authoritatively only insofar as they served to circumscribe the upward mobility of those segments of the working class that might realistically have aspired to the status of the skilled. (p. 236)

The labour aristocracy in South Africa

The notion of labour aristocracy was applied by some scholars in the 1960s and 1970s to post-colonial Africa. In a well-known study by Arrighi (1970), the labour aristocracy in Southern Rhodesia was referred to as a minority of African workers who worked for multi-national companies, who were paid decently, and who engaged with depoliticized unions. Arrighi consequently concluded that it was an alliance of this labour aristocracy with imperialism that distanced the labour aristocracy from any project of socialist transformation. Freund (1984) viewed Arrighi’s reference to labour aristocracy as an application of the concept once deplored by Lenin. Arrighi and Saul (1973) also referred to these workers as the proletariat proper consisting of the skilled and semi-skilled manual and clerical working class. Waterman (1975) underlined that these and many other scholars accepted the concept of labour aristocracy; however, “they were not able to douse the suspicions about its concrete existence and analytical utility. Moreover, they too did not investigate the problem of the active agents of conservatism among the working class” (p. 71). This led to a particular attention and importance given to the analysis of the South African case.

Scholars working on the labour history of South Africa engaged with the traditional theory of the labour aristocracy, which was mainly developed through the analysis of the British case. As there is a general suspicion of the notion of a labour aristocracy, scholars considered it significant to prove that white South African workers might be a case that explains how a section of the working class lives on the surplus produced by another section of the working class (Linder, 1985; “Introduction to…,” 1973; Waterman, 1975). Hence, the studies focusing on the particular and local South African case can be seen as a contribution to the reconstruction of the theory of labour aristocracy. In addition, by bringing a new dimension, race relations, to the labour aristocracy debate, these scholarly engagements show how an aristocracy of labour merges with an aristocracy of colour. And by demonstrating the existence of an authentic labour aristocracy, namely the white manual workers, this scholarship also underlines how South African white class interests were different from those in European countries.

In conjunction with a growing critique of apartheid both from within and outside the universities in the 1970s and 1980s, many academics involved in labour history produced knowledge that corrected some of the biases of traditional labour history in South Africa. Many of these major works (Davies, 1973; Johnstone, 1976; Simons & Simons, 1969; van Onselen, 1976; Wilson, 1972) dealt to a large extent with the class and racial dimensions of labour in the mining industry. A brief look at the changes in the South African social structure arising from the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 helps explain the sources of unskilled and skilled labour in the early stages of industrial development.

The inflow of foreign capital and an increased usage of scientific methods and technology meant that the gold mining industry required skilled labour. Given the lack of qualified labour in South Africa, skilled white labour had to be imported from the mines of Cornwall and Northern England (Davies, 1973; Katz, 1976; Linder, 1985). The gold mining industry was built on the basis of a highly-paid skilled white labour force together with a vast substratum of cheap, migrant non-white labour. The ratio of white to non-white labour on the Witwatersrand was approximately 1:7 in 1894 and 1895, and 1:9 in 1899 (Katz, 1976). Inflow of foreign capital into gold mining, together with the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, destroyed the rural settler economy of Afrikaners, who were forced to seek jobs as unskilled labourers in urban areas, jobs that had theretofore been performed by native Africans. The existence of this unskilled white urban population (i.e., the growing poor white problem) reinforced the demand for a segregated pattern of industrial relations (Davies, 1973; Katz, 1976). Hence, white labour was becoming a labour aristocracy from the very beginning of the gold mines, with corresponding skill and wage levels serving as the main aspects of an emerging colour bar.

The structural subordination of other workers as an important aspect of the notion of labour aristocracy in Britain took on a racial character in the South African case. While the subordinating position referred to white workers, the subordinated “other” workers were black workers. “A white working class that was ‘bounded’ profited from this system…while the poorly paid workers of colour provided the core of profitable value” (Freund, 2013, p. 495). Davies (1973) produced significant new knowledge on the labour aristocracy in South Africa, which rested upon this structural domination and wage levels. He demonstrated that the average white mining wage between 1911 and 1972 had been consistently above what he called the “average allowable wage with no surplus content,” an indication of the average wage each worker would receive if there were no exploitation (p. 49). The ratio of white wages to black wages in the gold mines in 1911 was 11.7:1.0, while by 1966 the gap had increased to 17.6:1.0. The productivity of black gold miners increased 188% between 1920 and 1965. The black increase in productivity was above the total average in productivity (157%). In other words, while black miners had increased their relative contribution of labour value, their relative income position had declined. Thus, Davies concluded that the white mine workers benefited from surplus value created by blacks. In addition, “white workers indirectly shared in the exploitation of blacks, via their political support for the State and the economic privileges they receive from it in return” (p. 51).

While Davies (1973) demonstrated the existence of an authentic labour aristocracy, Johnstone (1976, 2000) focused on the asymmetry of class structure and race relations and showed how white workers became privileged through a colour bar. According to Johnstone, the monopolistic structure of ownership of the gold mining industry

determined its class structure, which was divided between a class of capitalist owners and managers, and a class of wage earning workers. The working class was divided into a relatively small artisan and overseer labour aristocracy of white workers of about 20,000, and a large force of unskilled African labourers, nearly 200,000 in the 1920s. (2000: 117–18)

Johnstone’s analysis shows that class structure and racial stratification were thus asymmetrically related, with two white groups on top of a stratum of Africans. While the material differentiation of the white workers from the African workers was similar to the familiar artisan-labourer division of the working class in Europe, the former was significantly reinforced by the importance of colour in the South African environment as a criterion of access to rights, power, and status. In terms of both of these differentiations, the white workers occupied a privileged elite status relative to the African workers. “While these white workers had belonged to lower classes in Europe, on arrival to South Africa they found themselves in a position of an aristocracy of colour” (Johnstone, 2000, p. 119).

Colour bars had not been quite so necessary for the earliest English miners, since they could bargain with their skill and experience. But by the 20th century, “a large number of white workers who had nothing else to bargain with came to consider that institutional privileges over their black fellow workers…were vital” (Davies, 1973, p. 43). In 1896 the government accepted the demand of the Transvaal Engine Drivers’ Association that certificates be issued only to white engine drivers. Before 1900, crafts unions in the Cape and Natal regions had observed the tendency of the capitalists to use cheap Coloured, Indian, and African labour to undermine the wages of the skilled artisans. It was at this time that white artisans “fought for their existence. The Indians – or ‘Coolies’ – in Natal were categorised together with Japanese and Chinese as undesirable ‘competitors or neighbours’” (Katz, 1976, pp. 25–6). Although Coloureds, Indians, and Africans were gaining skills and performing semi-skilled and skilled work, they were not allowed to join the unions.

By the turn of the 20th century, the experimental idea of employing whites on unskilled jobs was implemented, but proved unsuccessful after a short while. The threat of indentured Chinese labour followed these failed experiments (Engelken, 2010; Katz, 1976). Webster et al. (2000) write that in 1907, white workers went on strike against a proposal by the mine owners to permit African and Chinese ‘indentured’ workers to perform skilled work. Immigrant, largely British workers held a jealously preserved monopoly of skilled work at this time and the strike was broken by replacing the strikers with unemployed Afrikaner workers. This was a breakthrough for the emerging Afrikaner working class (p. 91).

In the course of the strikes in 1913, 1914 and 1922, white miners advanced “their privileged position against the employers’ attempt at introducing cheaper African labour” (Webster et al., 2000, p. 91). In fact, the 1922 strikes are seen as the most important steps “in the making of a white labour aristocracy” (Webster et al., 2000, p. 91).

Johnstone (2000) notes that several factors increased “the importance of the job colour bar to the white workers and led to the Status Quo Agreement of 1918” (p. 122). These include “the departure of many white workers to the [First World] War and their replacement by ‘poor white’ Afrikaners, the increasing ratio of Africans to whites in the labour force, and the increasing employment of Africans in semi-skilled work” (p. 122). However, by the end of 1919, growing production costs and declining profits led the mining companies to lower the degree of protection of white labour through the job colour bar. The mine owners started reducing the number of privileged, highly-paid white workers and replacing some of them with African workers. After two years, the Chamber of Mines declared that they “would no longer abide by the Status Quo Agreement” (Johnstone, 2000, p. 122). Refusing the reductions in their privileged jobs and status, white workers went on strike in January 1922; it was crushed by the army in a bloody way and resulted in 153 deaths after two months (Webster et al., 2000). The Chamber, in the end, became successful in securing a reduction in the number of white workers.

The white workers’ strike in 1922 was marked by its racist character as evidenced by the slogan “Workers of the world, fight and unite for a White South Africa!” Hence, racism became a conscious and rational response for white mine workers who were concerned with promoting their privileged position (Davies, 1973; Johnstone, 2000). Krikler’s (2005) work on the 1922 revolt shows that the racial massacre during the strike was intrinsically linked to the politics of the rank-and-file strikers. He notes that the strike

turned in its late phase into a “racial killing” of the non-striking and even casual black workers and residents, a terrifying assertion of supremacy over a symbolic (black) enemy at the moment when it became clear that the infinitely more formidable white enemy had defeated the rebels. (Krikler, 2005, p. 137)

However, Krikler (2005) suggests that violent militancy of the early 1920s “is to be understood in terms of a perceived violation of the political compact that all whites, including wage workers, had a part to play in maintaining the dominance of their race in the country” (p. 148). He agrees that white labour was able to secure areas of racially-protected employment when the Labour-Nationalist Pact government came to power. However, as he stresses, long before this, it was the first government of a unified South Africa, a government unrepresentative of organized white labour, that passed the Mines and Works Act of 1911. Hence, for Krikler, “the primacy of the politics of white supremacy” should be an important part of our understanding of the relationship between race and class in apartheid South Africa (p. 144). White labour was incorporated into the ruling bloc in the 1920s in such an effective way that there were no more white-worker insurrections after 1924 (Freund, 2013; Yudelman, 1983).

It should be mentioned that a break with the mass of white workers who tended to support the Labour Party or the National Party had already started during the General Strike of 1913 and developed in the following years (Freund, 2013). The activities of the anarchists and syndicalists and other radical groupings, which also engaged in the emergence of organization among black workers, had an anti-racist character (Kenefick, 2010; Van der Walt, 1999). However, as Hyslop (2010) remarks, their anti-racist ideas were not influential on the mass of white trade unionists. Similarly, the syndicalist and communist leaders of 1922 tried to oppose the racial attacks but were not able to restrain their supporters. Nevertheless, “the 1922 strike strengthened the argument of those socialists who argued that the white workers had been co-opted and that it was the black workers and peasants who were the most exploited sections of the working class” (Webster et al., 2000, p. 92). This reminds us of the analysis of labour aristocracy in the British case, in which the role of the labour aristocracy in trade unions and correspondingly in the Labour Party in Britain was regarded as weakening the democratic and socialist movements by having destroyed working-class unity. A similar call for radical forms of expression led to a new orientation in the strategy of the Communist Party of South Africa.

Another point of analysis would be the authority at work or social control as an aspect of labour aristocracy in the mainstream approaches. The structure of the labour market on the mines in South Africa demonstrates, at first glance, that the skilled white miners had this authority at work. Highly-paid white professional miners and skilled artisans supervised the unskilled low-paid, non-white manual labourers. A group of African workers was under the arbitrary control of the white miners, who shared in the earnings resulting from the rising productivity of African gold miners (Webster et al., 2000; Wilson, 1972). With reference to another study by Katz (1994), Krikler (2005) underlines that not only skilled white workers, but all white workers – including the semi-skilled and unskilled – would have black workers under their command. Krikler (2005, 2010) explains this superordinate position of white workers in the gold mining industry by referring to master-servant relations between races in the colonial world. He argues that “master-servant relations […] were not only intrinsic to the racial order, but key to uniting the classes within white society” in South Africa in the early 20th century (2010, p.133). Krikler (2010) points out that “White working class households routinely employed black domestic servants” similar to whites of substantial property or of the middle class (p. 136) and that “White workers in South Africa – whatever their relationship to their employers – habitually took on the role of master in their relations with black people” (p. 138). A careful reading of Krikler’s (2005) study also reveals that not only the mineworkers from Britain and Australia, but also Afrikaner workers, carried a strong view regarding a strict hierarchy of the races in the workplace. For this reason, all whites, British and Afrikaner alike, “across the classes benefited” from master-servant relations, both at home and at the workplace (Krikler, 2010, p. 136). Krikler’s study also leads us to think that the more a racial consciousness was developed among the white workers of all categories, the more skill disappeared from being the primary aspect of labour aristocracy in South Africa.

But the most ubiquitous apparatus of control was the compound system, which imposed total control on the African workers while they were at the mines (Callinicos, 1981; Webster et al., 2000). African workers were housed in compounds away from their families, while white workers were housed in mine houses with their families. Callinicos explains that:

If workers gave trouble or tried to resist their low wages or conditions of work, it was easy for the army and the police to surround the compounds and imprison the workers.…[Compounds] separated the mineworkers from other workers, controlled them and turned them into labour machines. (2000: 109)

The control of African labour should also be underlined as a core aspect of the colonial state construction. “To the extent that they resisted European labour discipline, African societies were stigmatized as dens of ‘laziness’ and ‘depravity’” (Young, 1994, as cited in Barchiesi, 2007, p. 23). This is also connected to social citizenship and the social identity aspect of the labour aristocracy. Similar to the British case, the labour aristocrats in South Africa had a self-image as the respectable segment of the manual working class that bordered the petty bourgeoisie. “Although they performed manual tasks at home or in Australia, it was construed as socially degrading for white men to do the kind of work normally done by ‘uncivilised’ black men” (Katz, 1976, pp. 19–20). In the same line, “the enforcement of colour bars” and the “‘civilized labour’ policy of the Pact Government” assured that white workers no longer performed such degrading manual work in the mines (Davies, 1973, pp. 45, 48). Other social aspects of the identity of white labour aristocracy can be seen in housing, education, and other social sectors. Housing of black workers in compounds and white workers in mine houses was only a part of the segregation that reached a point in the 1950s where the urban centres became only white and blacks needed special passes to enter the city. Furthermore, while whites benefited from large sums of social investment by the state, apartheid legislation increasingly prohibited the training and registration of African workers as skilled workers outside the “Bantu areas.”

Transnational connections

Our understanding of the labour aristocracy in South Africa would benefit from connecting the history of white labour in both Britain and other British-settled colonies with the one in South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century. In this regard, Hyslop (1999) convincingly defines an imperial white-labour consciousness that goes beyond the traditional territorial boundaries in the explanation of racism of white labour. He argues that “the white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of ‘nationally’ discrete entities, but were bound together into an imperial working class” (p. 399). He views “the rise of working class racism in turn-of-the-century Britain,” “the politics of the ‘White Australia’ policy,” and “the beginning of South African industrial segregation” as “part of a single story” of “a common ideology of White Labourism” (p. 399). Hyslop points out, for instance, how the deported leaders of the white workers’ strike in South Africa in 1913 and 1914 were greeted by a huge demonstration of the British working class in London, although they were the unionists who demanded the exclusion of nonwhite workers from skilled jobs in South Africa. A closer look at Hyslops’s and other scholars’ analyses of the international mobility of the Cornish miners as well as of the employment of Chinese labourers, especially in Australia and South Africa, would help us to connect the racial labour politics of Britain, Australia, and South Africa.

Hyslop’s analysis is based on the historical study of skilled mine workers originating from Cornwall in England who became remarkably mobile across the continents, first to North America and then to Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century. After work experience in Australia for around 40 years, Cornish miners moved in large numbers to South Africa following the depression in Australian mining during the 1880s. These workers brought with them the “White Labourist” position that they gained from their experience in the Australian labour movement (Hyslop, 1999, p. 412; Katz, 1976).

It is also important to mention that there was a border-crossing support for this kind of white political position. Liberals who launched a campaign against the use of Chinese labour in the Transvaal won the elections of 1906 in Scotland with the support of the Cornish mining constituencies. A similar anti-Chinese attitude of white workers was also seen in their riots in the British maritime industries in 1911 and 1914. Thus, “the use of Chinese labour in various industries in different parts of the British Empire, particularly in Australia and South Africa, was one of the most central issues that triggered an imperial white working class consciousness” (Hyslop, 2010, pp. 76–7).

The outflow of Chinese and Indian migrants in the late 19th century created a competitive international labour market, in which “one possibility for workers of European origin was to seek economic protection from the state by appealing to the idea that they were racial partners in empire” (Hyslop, 1999, p. 405). In Australia, Chinese workers faced exclusionary measures and campaigns in various sectors from the 1850s onwards, first in the goldfields and then in the emerging sugar industry. The employment of Chinese labour was a central grievance in the Seaman’s Strike of 1878, which is regarded as one of the most symbolically significant strikes in Australian history (Hyslop, 1999, p. 406), during which “the struggle to save British Australia’ was given a ‘national character,’ by the public and media support and the involvement of other unions” (Affeldt, 2010, p. 109). The newly-founded unions excluded these migrant labourers from membership and played a major role in bringing about the passage of Exclusion Acts in the various Australian colonies in 1888, aimed at shutting out Chinese immigration (Hyslop, 1999, p. 406; Affeldt, 2010, p. 107). The racially defined borders of Australian labour were also seen in their support of the formation of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 with a condition of protecting white workers’ jobs, while excluding all other races from the labour market (Hyslop, 1999, p. 407). Briefly, the workers who moved to South Africa had already been nurtured in this racist political ideal in Australia.

In South Africa the gold industry in the Transvaal was suffering from the shortage of African labour. Along the lines of Australia, the employment of whites in both skilled and unskilled positions did not appear to be a realistic option. Hence, the Transvaal decided to introduce “more than 60 000 indentured Chinese labourers into the colony between 1904 and 1906” (Engelken, 2010, p. 163). Though the Chinese labourers were introduced to supplement the unskilled African workforce, skilled white mine workers feared that the Chinese would replace the whites and threaten their “status as a labour aristocracy” (p. 173). Strong objections were expressed during the course of the protests organized by the African Labour League, the White League, and the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council, which forced the authorities to consult with the unions on the regulation of indentured Chinese labour. Finally, “the Labour Importation Ordinance of 1904, which regulated the importation of the Chinese labourers, introduced extensive colour bars, excluding Chinese from some 55 [skilled and semi-skilled] jobs” (p. 165). Apart from their restriction to unskilled labour only in gold mines, they were not allowed to do any trade or hold property. Moreover, from the conditions of their leave from their district of employment to their clothing with identification, many aspects of their work and daily life were strictly regulated. The importance of this regulation is that it firstly targeted the Chinese labourers, but it later extended to all other nonwhite labourers. As Yap and Leong Man (1996) remark, “in essence, legalised racial job reservation started when the Chinese were imported and remained a prominent future of employment in South Africa for succeeding generations” (p. 108).

The Chinese labour controversy was momentous in the sense that it escalated the formation of a white labour aristocracy and a white cross-class alliance in South Africa. The Cornish, whether they came via other countries or direct to South Africa, played a remarkable role in the initial emergence of White Labourist unions (Hyslop, 1999). These workers and worker leaders, with some work experience in Australia or born in Australia, played a prominent role in the agitation against Chinese labour and advocated racial discrimination in early 20th-century South Africa (Engelken, 2010; Katz, 1976).

Conclusion

This paper explored the labour aristocracy in early 20th-century South Africa by bringing together various insights that go beyond traditional conceptual and territorial boundaries. It illustrated how the identified key dimensions attributed to the labour aristocracy could be considered in the analysis of the particular South African case. While putting an emphasis on the investigation of an authentic labour aristocracy through a new dimension, namely race relations, it also demonstrated the intersecting asymmetrical relations between class structure and racial stratification. This analysis was extended to the formation of a white working-class consciousness through transnational mobility of workers across the British Empire.

Although mainstream approaches tend to separate different dimensions of labour aristocracy and set one of them as the key dimension of a labour aristocracy, analysis of the South African case demonstrates that all of these dimensions are interconnected and need to be adopted simultaneously as aspects of the white labour aristocracy. The conditions of labour in a racially segregated labour system were set according to the privileges and benefits of the white labour aristocracy in all these areas: higher wages, superior positions and authority at work, high status, culture, education, housing, and participation in the political parties and the power bloc. It would simply not be possible to understand low wages of black workers without connecting it to the establishment of compounds or the superior position of a white worker without seeing the reservation of skilled jobs for white workers, etc.

These analyses, going beyond the traditional conceptual and territorial boundaries, not only contribute to the understanding of the local case of South Africa, but are also regarded as providing extraordinary clarity to what labour aristocracy could mean in a reconstructed theory of aristocracy of labour. In the final analysis, it can be said that these scholarly engagements with the labour aristocracy in South Africa particularized and reordered the mainstream approaches to labour aristocracy and, furthermore, expanded them by including a new dimension, namely race relations. Moreover, these perspectives, deeply engaging with the local case, enrich the analysis of South African society and reconstruct the mainstream theory rather than develop an autonomous theory. Equally important is the inclusion of a transnational dimension, which this paper demonstrates to be extremely useful in the analysis of this local (South African) case. This analysis would certainly be enhanced through the exploration of other issues that go beyond the scope of this paper, such as the forms and nature of white workers’ relations with black workers in the United States and in South Africa; diverging relationships of whites with the indigenous populations in Australia and South Africa; the complexities of whiteness in Australia and South Africa, and, respectively, the conditions that limited the application of Australia’s model in South Africa; and the role of transnational corporations in the development of racial segregation in South Africa.