Description:

John Higginson teaches in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is also a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences and the Department of History at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Mineworker, 1907-1951 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Cambridge University Press will publish his monograph Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 in October 2014. He has written numerous articles and book chapters on South Africa and the regional economic system of southern Africa.

My new research project places American mining engineers among the key actors forging the struts of the twentieth century global economy. I place particular emphasis on their activities in South Africa’s deep level gold mines between 1893 and the recent past. I examine the life histories and aspirations of four representative engineers at close hand—Frederich Russell Burnham, John Hays Hammond Sr., William Lincoln Honnold and Herbert Hoover. These four men assisted in calibrating the continued expansion of South Africa’s deep level gold mines with the gestations of the global financial structure. In so doing, they transformed the commanding heights of business activity and political life in the United States and South Africa. They also extended the shelf life of racial segregation as a means of social engineering in both countries.