Race, class loyalty and the structure of capitalism: Coal miners in Alabama and the Transvaal, 1918-1922

Focusing on two major coal-industry strikes, one in Alabama (1920-1921) and one in the Transvaal (1922), this article seeks to understand why the former was biracial and the latter only involved white employees. The contrast is interesting because of its wider significance within the US and South Africa, and because of resemblances between the two cases. In Alabama, blacks and whites undertook similar work and there were cultural commonalities as well as divides, but in the Transvaal the economic and social gulf was so great that, for practical purposes, there were two working classes. In Alabama, most black miners and most white miners were free and settled, and came from similar rural areas. In the Transvaal, whilst blacks were coerced and migrated between subsistence societies and the collieries, whites were free and settled, and mostly had proletarian backgrounds. In South Africa, the regular supply of 'cheap' black labour - upon which the economy depended - was maintained by institutions created or supported by the state. It is argued, finally, that whilst the possibility of interracialism was rooted in the outcome of the Civil War, the institutionalisation of a dual working class was a product of imperialist victory in the South African War.