Papers by lance van sittert
BRILL eBooks, 2008
You have talked so often of going to the dogs-and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached t... more You have talked so often of going to the dogs-and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them. .. 1 George Orwell * This chapter was À rst published in SAHJ 48 (2003), pp. 138-173 and has been used with permission of the South African Historical Journal.
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Mar 21, 2018
South African Historical Journal, May 1, 2004
LABOUR, CAPITAL AND THE STATE IN THE ST HELENA BAY FISHERIES C.1856-C.1956 This thesis deals with... more LABOUR, CAPITAL AND THE STATE IN THE ST HELENA BAY FISHERIES C.1856-C.1956 This thesis deals with the history of the St Helena Bay inshore fish er i es, 1856-1956. Fishing has long been neglected by s o cial and ec o nomic h i storians and the myths propagated by c ompany and popu l ar writers still hold sway. The thesis challenges these by s it uating commercial fishing at St Helena Bay i n the c onte x t o f c hanging regional, national and international economies an d sh o wi ng h o w i t was shaped and conditioned by the struggle f o r o wnership of the marine resource between labour and capital, med i ated by the state.
Journal of Southern African Studies, Sep 3, 2015
Social Science Research Network, Jul 21, 2009
South African Journal of Science, Mar 1, 2010
The American Historical Review, Nov 25, 2013
Journal of African History, 2005
Grounding Urban Natures, 2019
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2017
The South African fisheries are environmentally bifurcated by the different current regimes on th... more The South African fisheries are environmentally bifurcated by the different current regimes on the west (Benguela) and east (Agulhas) coasts. Limited precolonial subsistence use of the littoral zone was supplemented from the mid-17th century by commercial harvesting of marine mammals for international trade and fish to ration imported slave labor. The liberalization of trade after 1814 led to the commercialization of Benguela fisheries by Cape Town merchants drying barrracouta (snoek) for export to ration indentured Indian labor on the sugar plantations of the southwest Indian Ocean and canning rock lobster to feed the urban bourgeoisies of Europe. The mineral revolution in the final quarter of the 19th century created an expanded southern African demand for fish in the new mining centers of the subcontinent, prompting the colonial state to pioneer the demersal fisheries of the Agulhas current, which were monopolized for the first half of the 20th century by British-owned steam traw...
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2016
Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where ... more Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where commercial stock farmers encountered indigenous hunter-gatherers. This paper supports and extends Adhikari’s analysis by broadening its anthropocentric focus to include other species. It shows that the key technologies of genocide employed in the extermination of San hunter-gatherers were subsequently incorporated into everyday Cape stock farming practice and redeployed from the late nineteenth through to the end of the twentieth century in a continual ‘vermin extermination’ campaign against other indigenous commercial stock ‘predators’. The institutionalisation of animal genocide in Cape stock farming served to maintain white farmer solidarity and hegemony, especially in marginal environments, by both militarising the countryside and intimidating the rural proletariat through the routinised symbolical re-enactment of the original act of conquest into acquiescence to white stock farmer ownership and use of the land.
South African Historical Journal, 2003
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2016
While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same can... more While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered nature of child indenture, its relation to and dampening effect on adult wage rates, and its contributions to reproducing proletarian households in the commercialising pastoral economy of the Great Karoo. In so doing, it troubles two prevailing assumptions about the post-emancipation Cape labour market: that settler employers dictated the terms of exchange through coercion, and that the proletarian household was a haven from such exploitation. It detects evidence for both the patrimonial exchange and parental exploitation of proletarian children. Finally, the article offers a corrective to the scholarship on the invention of colonial childhood in the final quarter of the 19th century, based exclusively on the white middle-class experience of the south-western Cape, by suggesting that post-emancipation black childhood was without formal education or indolent adolescence, but rather an apprenticeship in labour.
Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 2016
Trade in live animals has been associated with populations of invasive species as well as the spr... more Trade in live animals has been associated with populations of invasive species as well as the spread of disease. The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, was exported from its native region of southern Africa for use in pregnancy testing, and later for laboratory use as the model amphibian. We use historical export figures and publication records to detail the size and extent of the global trade. In addition, we explore the link between exports, scientific use, and invasive populations and chytrid outbreaks. Exports reached 400 000 animals in the first 30 years from 1940, but only 86 000 were sent outside Africa. Exports out of Africa peaked in the 1950s, while scientific publications using Xenopus laevis grew in the 1970s, coinciding with a rise in invasive populations and chytrid outbreaks. We show a lag between exports of Xenopus laevis and a rise in invasive populations of around 15 years. Our data demonstrate the global reach of the exports of Xenopus laevis from South Africa, and a later, much wider distribution via the scientific network which was supplied by secondary means outside of South Africa. We contend that our data demonstrate that by 1970, Xenopus laevis was the world's most widely distributed amphibian: institutions in 48 countries were supplied with live colonies on all continents except Antarctica. There is some evidence linking exports and scientific studies with invasive populations, but others appear to be linked to secondary distributors of this species.
Journal of Family History, 2015
There is a lacuna in the scholarship on child labor in Africa in general and the Cape Colony in p... more There is a lacuna in the scholarship on child labor in Africa in general and the Cape Colony in particular between the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and the start of state regulation of childhood around the turn of the twentieth century. This is not for want of sources. Historians of the Cape colony have traditionally mined the criminal records to divine relations of production in the postemancipation countryside, which they have unsurprisingly characterized as marred by high levels of violence between settlers and black labor. There is a danger in the reliance on the criminal records of (mis)taking the exception for the rule or of doing history “backward.” The records generated by the implementation of the Masters and Servants Acts offer a much needed corrective to the criminal record, documenting as they do the everyday relations of production in the postemancipation colonial Cape countryside rather than the exceptional moments of breakdown. Read for their aggregate trends, they provide a rich and illuminating source on ordinary child employment practices and suggest the fashioning of postemancipation rural black childhood as manual labor. The surviving archives of two Great Karoo magistracies, Beaufort West and Colesberg, contain the indenture contracts of more than 550 children over the half century after 1856, two-thirds of whom were indentured by their own families and the other third by magistrates acting in loco parentis for either “destitute children” or “juvenile offenders.”
Kronos (Bellville, South Africa), 2002
When the young botanist William Burchell rambled on Table Mountain in 1810, he recognised "[... more When the young botanist William Burchell rambled on Table Mountain in 1810, he recognised "[i]n the bushes, weeds and herbage by the road-side, at every step .. , some well-known flower which I had seen nursed with great care in the greenhouses of England." Burchell found that "[m]any beautiful flowers, well known in the choicer collections in England, grow wild on this mountain, as the heath and the primrose on the commons and sunny banks of our own country."l "Cape flora" had been "quite the rage" in Europe for some time: from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards
Historical reconstruction of guano production on the Namibian islands 1843-1895 Lance van Sittert... more Historical reconstruction of guano production on the Namibian islands 1843-1895 Lance van Sittert a* and Rob Crawford b T his paper presents data on guano production on the Namibian islands from 1843 to 1895, reconstructed from the nineteenthcentury customs records of the Cape Colony and United Kingdom. As the latter was the primary market for Namibian guano during this period, the data series can be considered to encompass the global production on the islands. Interpretation of the records as a proxy index for fish stock abundance is complicated by the interplay of cultural and environmental factors in influencing annual production. When compared with rainfall records from the Royal Observatory in Cape Town (1846-1895), the guano data are suggestive of a relationship between guano production and environment, but firm conclusions must await better proxy records, perhaps based on fish scales in seafloor sediments off the Namibian coast.
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Papers by lance van sittert