Copper, capital and the men who dug it
Charles Perrings’s 1979 study follows African mineworkers on the Northern Rhodesian and Belgian Congo Copperbelts between 1911 and 1941, and the industrial capitalism that employed them.
The story
The copper mines of Central Africa needed workers, and over the years they drew together a new kind of workforce: Africans who lived on wages. Charles Perrings set out to trace how that workforce was formed and how its position shifted, on the Copperbelts of Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, over the three decades from 1911 to 1941. His subtitle names what he was after: industrial strategies, and the making of an African proletariat.
He follows the companies’ policies and their recruiting, the ways workers pushed back, and how households made a living, all inside the politics and economics of colonial rule. The book came out in 1979 from Africana Publishing Company in New York and was issued in Britain by Heinemann. It remains useful for histories of African labour, colonial extraction and industrialisation.
This copy is in red cloth, in its pictorial dust jacket, which is worn at the edges, with chips and tears at the upper corners and the head of the spine. Inside, the pages and hinges are in serviceable shape.
Details
- Date
- 1979
- Publisher
- Africana Publishing Company, New York
- Binding
- cloth: Reddish cloth with illustrated paper dust jacket
- Condition
- Red cloth hardback in a pictorial jacket with noticeable edgewear, chipping, and tears at upper jacket corners and head of spine; interior and hinges appear serviceable.