Reflections on D. Money's piece on Cumberland miners and the Rand

Abstract

We are all familiar with the method of comparative history, pioneered for South Africa by scholars such as George Fredrickson, John Cell and Stanley Greenburg, and which has been much developed since then. But, as Shula Marks emphasised many years ago at an international conference on race and class in Oxford, we should be alive not just to comparison but to connection. Duncan Money’s piece reminds us of the importance of Marks’s point. For his study illuminates, not by comparing mining on the Rand and in Kimberley with that in Cumberland, but by demonstrating how and why these areas were linked – and intensely so – for a time. And his detailed tracing of the connections unearths the contrasting economic histories of the regions that were central to forging the connection. In effect, the decline of iron mining in Cumberland – which deprived miners there of livelihoods – was coincident with the rise of the giant mining industry on the Rand which drew these iron miners, with their crucial skills, from the north of England to the Witwatersrand.