Uneven Labour Migration in Southern Africa

Abstract

The literature on the historical roots of southern Africa’s migrant labour system is growing rapidly. Works pitched at the level of the system as a whole have been most common to date. A number of general concepts have consequently emerged which attempt to give substance to the nature and role of early labour migration. It is increasingly apparent that many of these concepts, while not without value, may hinder rather than help further exploration of the making of migrant labour. They are serving both to obscure the complexity and struggles which beset migrant labour systems at their foundation and to divert attention away from a set of processes and relationships which must be included in any explanatory account of the history of labour migrancy. In order to understand the complex character and regional variability of early labour migration it is essential that the concepts be disaggregated. The present paper criticalIy reviews a number of concepts, and the theoretical and empirical charges levelled against them. This is seen as a prelude to the construction of a research prospectus which might inform future work by historians and historical geographers in this important area.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.