Keith Breckenridge

This paper traces the origins of the large gold mining companies in South Africa in the period before 1920. All of these companies (Rand Mines, Gold Fields, Central Mining, Anglo-American) were established by American mining engineers. These engineers were extremely influential in both countries, and participants in the social revolution that changed American capitalism in the 1920s. The paper will explore the political effects of the demands that these mining engineers made of the Republican and Imperial states in southern Africa (demands that formed the basis of the British Imperial Reconstruction between 1900 and 1905) but it will also examine the ways in which the engineers, custodians of a specifically American culture of technology, laid the foundation of corporate capitalism in southern Africa.