Doctoral Degrees (History)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10413/7191

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The Suez Canal in world history, 1854-1956.
(1965) Farnie, Douglas Antony.
No abstract available.
The problem of an African mission in a white dominated, multi-racial society : the American Zulu mission in South Africa, 1885-1910.
(1971) Switzer, Lester Ernest.; Webb, Colin de Berri.
No abstract available.
The political career of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, 1895-1906.
(1973) Duminy, Andrew Hadley.; Horton, Weldon J.
No abstract available.
The Customs Tariff and the development of secondary industry in South Africa with special reference to the period 1924-1939.
(1974) Lumby, Anthony Bernard.; Duminy, Andrew Hadley.; Allan, I. K.
No abstract available
An analytical survey of the political career of Leander Starr Jameson, 1900-1912.
(1979) Siepman, Milton Ralph.
No abstract available.
The Federal Party, 1953-1962 : an English-speaking reaction to Afrikaner nationalism.
(1979) Reid, Brian Lawrence.; Duminy, Andrew Hadley.
No abstract available.
The transfrontiersman : the career of John Dunn in Natal and Zululand 1834-1895.
(1980) Ballard, Charles Cameron.; Maylam, Paul.
No abstract available.
The idea of a hermeneutic of history.
(1982) Posel, Rosalind.; Horton, Weldon J.; Stofberg, J. A.
Constantly confronted by history, man has what may be termed a natural impulse to make sense of the past. And indeed, the past cannot be understood without also understanding the present. Thus that fundamental historical impulse is profoundly philosophical in the Socratic sense. It is because hermeneutics explicitly identifies itself with the Socratic tradition, that my attempt to elucidate the nature of written history as an academic discipline has been located within a hermeneutic point of view. In the course of this thesis I refer to several major debates in social theory. However, I make no pretense at covering these debates fully. They are cited insofar as they bear on issues arising in the development of the idea of a hermeneutic of history.
The question of 'Indian penetration' in the Durban area and Indian politics, 1940-1946.
(1983) Bagwandeen, Dowlat Ramdas.; Warhurst, Philip R.
No abstract available.
The Zulu royal family under the South African Government, 1910- 1933 : Solomon kaDinuzulu, Inkatha and Zulu nationalism.
(1985) Cope, Nicholas Lidbrook Griffin.; Maylam, Paul.
No abstract available.
The South African parliamentary opposition, 1948-1953.
(1989) White, William Barry.; Duminy, Andrew Hadley.
The primary focus of the thesis is the attempt by the United Party, between 1948 and 1953, to regain political power. It argues that although policy issues were important, insufficient attention has thus far been paid to the United Party's organisational weakness, particularly in regard to its inability adequately to register and delete voters, as an explanation for the Party's 1948 defeat. The United Party had, therefore, from a far more heterogeneous base of support, not only to implement organisational reforms so as to evince an efficiency equal to that of the National Party but had also to clarify what it intended to achieve by its pragmatic race' policy. It is argued that the essence of the latter had been white immigration. Only a substantial white population, it was felt, would induce that sense of white security sufficient to allow the peaceful accommodation of the' aspirations of the unenfranchised. Faced with the immediate curtailment of immigration and unable to emphasise, through fear of alienating marginal Afrikaans-speaking voters, its importance, the Party was progressively forced to give ii ground on its race policy. Its tendency to do so and yet demand the retention of constitutional guarantees made the Party an easy target for Government manipulation. Seen against this background the United Party initiative in encouraging the establishment of the War veterans' Torch Commando, its formal alliance with the Labour Party and the considerable structural reforms it was able to implement as a consequence of its informal alliance mining interests, failed to halt the voters away from it. with financial and swing of marginal The United Party's 1953 General Election defeat not only resulted in a crippling collapse of its financial support but also led to a gradual realignment of opposition parliamentary politics towards a rapprochement with those extra-parliamentary forces which were already assuming their place as the real opposition to the National Party Government.
Society, economy and criminal activity in colonial Natal, 1860-1893.
(1993) Anderson, Leigh Reginald.; Ballard, Charles Cameron.
No abstract available.
Durban 1824-1910 : the formation of a settler elite and its role in the development of a colonial city.
(1994) Bjorvig, Anna Christina.; Laband, John.; Thompson, Paul Singer.
The formation of a settler elite and its role in colonial Durban's urban development between 1854 and 1910 have been studied. In this instance of early colonial capitalism, local business leaders readily established an intimate connection between economic and political power. Many of them used their position on the Durban Town Council, formed in 1854, to wield preponderant civic influence and become the driving force in the development of the town. The nature of this settler elite has been investigated in terms of the theories of social stratification, formulated along Weberian lines. Following the institutionalization of power arrangements these leading settlers were legally acknowledged as a governing elite. Durban provided the setting in which metropolitan institutions, activity patterns and environments could be introduced and maintained, as dictated by the underlying value-system of the British settlers. The colonial city of Durban hereby not only demonstrated the appearance of a civilization, but also the mutual interaction between man's behaviour and his culturally modified environment. The ruling elite regarded the beautification of the urban environment as part of their civic responsibilities in this city-building process. Such a civic pride was especially applied in Durban to the building of impressive Town Halls and public buildings. These leaders also played a decisive role with regard to harbour improvements, railways, tramways, electricity supply, telephone services and sanitary improvements. Following a historical pattern of colonial urban development, Durban became another British city in Africa. Yet it possessed local features which made it atypical, if not unique, in a South African context. The driving force and way of life of the town during the colonial period was clearly British.
The years of red dust : aspects of the effects of the great depression on Natal, 1929-1933.
(1994) Edley, David William Montague.; Warhurst, Philip R.
The Great Depression has received relatively little attention from South African historians and economists. Most studies of the period concentrate almost exclusively on political aspects, and ignore the economic realities. Little attempt has been made to quantify and analyse the effects of the depression and drought, nor has a proper integration of these economic realities and their impact on politics been attempted. There is perhaps good reason for this. There is such a wealth of material to be digested that the task has been perceived as too daunting for a single researcher. Local or thematic studies have therefore been undertaken. This thesis is essentially a local history study which examines the effects of the Great Depression on the then province of Natal. The depression affected all areas of economic activity in the region; industry, coalmining, and both commercial and subsistence agriculture. Hardly any aspect of life was untouched. It scarred the collective consciousness of an entire generation. Under the twin onslaughts of the depression and drought, the people of Natal turned to the state for assistance. The state turned out to be a poor provider, preferring to devote its efforts to alleviating distress ' among white farmers, while forcing the major burden of relief onto the urban local authorities. Such authorities were obviously reluctant to assist anyone other than their own burgesses. Prevailing racist sentiments ensured that the major economic burden was passed onto those who could least afford to bear it, the African majority. Government policy held that Africans were expendable components of the urban work-force; when the economy shrank they were simply expected to return to their places of origin. During these years the idea that the reserves could accommodate all the "surplus" African workers was finally exploded. Isolated from the centres of power, and under intense pressure from the depression and drought, white Natalians reacted with characteristic jingoism and agitated for the secession of the province from the Union. Black politics, which had reached boiling point prior to the depression, fell into a slump, also occasioned by the prevailing economic woes. Militancy turned into co-operation.
The origins of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.
(1995) Cope, Richard Lidbrook.; Garson, Noel.
Abstract available in the pdf file.
The levying of forced African labour and military service by the colonial state of Natal.
(1995) Machin, Ingrid Mary.; Guest, William Rupert.; Edgecombe, D. Ruth.
Abstract available in pdf file.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies and politics, 1930-1978.
(1995) Ben-Meir, Atalia.
The pivot around which the controversy over the Board's political policy revolved was the question whether a collective Jewish attitude towards the government's racial policies should be formulated, or whether this was the province of individual Jewish protest. Stemming from this was the question of the extent of communal responsibility towards the individual who had fallen afoul with the law in expressing his protest. The complexity of formulating policy was exacerbated by the trauma of the 1930's and 1940's where the National Party and its leadership espoused a radical anti-Semitic ideology and a pro-Nazism policy. Added to this was the very real sympathy felt for the aspirations of survival of the Afrikaner People, conflated by a revulsion and antipathy towards the measures the nationalist Government took to attain this end. The solution hit upon by the Board was a policy of 'neutrality' in the political area. This dissertation is an attempt to highlight the problems with which the Board grappled and its central concerns in formulating policy vis-a-vis the political issues that were at the centre of the political life of South Africa. The study follows the evolvement of the policy of collective non-involvement from the 1950s and the gradual evolution it underwent in the 1970s and 1980s towards a commitment and a responsibility to openly and publicly speak out on the moral aspects of Apartheid. In view of the above, the thesis begins in 1930 with the promulgation of the Quota Act, which initiated the new antisemitic policies of the National Party, until 1978. The epilogue ends 1985 when the Board of Deputies abandoned its policy of neutrality towards the political arena, when the 33rd National congress of the Jewish Board of Deputies, passed a resolution condemning the Policy of Apartheid, thus adopting a collective stance towards the government's racial policies. Although this stance was in line with the views prevalent in the white community, it signalled a giant step in the Board of Deputies' drive to abandon its policy of accommodation towards the NP government and Nationalist forces.
White farmers, social institutions and settler masculinity in the Natal Midlands, 1880-1920.
(1996) Morrell, Robert Graham.; Freund, William Mark.
The midlands was the first area occupied and farmed by white settlers. It became the agricultural heartland of colonial Natal. Its farmers became politically and economically powerful. Their success rested on the construction of a community. They formed a close-knit society in which family links and a sense of belonging were constantly reinforced. The community was closed to blacks. A keen sense of class was developed which made it difficult for outsiders to gain admission. In order to become a member, new immigrants could enroll in some of the many social institutions which were created. It was these institutions which served to integrate the community, to order and police it, and to define it. The community was composed of people who all owned land. A sense of belonging to this community was achieved in a number of ways. Families were nurtured, becoming exceptionally important as institutions through which wealth was passed. They were places of social interaction as well as transgenerational units which ensured a continuous presence in the area. Amongst the institutions which the settlers founded were schools, societies, volunteer regiments. agricultural organisations and sports clubs. The institutions were consciously modelled on their metropolitan counterparts. Settler masculinity was nurtured in the institutions. It prescribed male behaviour according to the values of a land-owning settler gentry. This masculinity was disseminated throughout the colony, becoming a key feature of the colonial gender order. A strong emphasis was placed on being tough and fit, on obedience and teamwork. These were values which gave sport major popularity within the colony and which fueled a militarism that had a bloody and brutal climax in the 1906 rebellion. The institutions gave men power and served as networks by which white male prestige and influence was sustained . Although women were formally excluded. they occupied a central position within the family and made a major contribution to the reproduction of the community. White boys and men found the demands of settler masculinity exacting. Nevertheless. apart from providing them with powerful places in the colonial order, its emphasis on male companionship and fit bodies produced a powerful camaraderie. On the other hand. It stigmatised men who did not fit the mould, enforcing conformity as it did so. Settler society was able to renew and reproduce itself largely through its own institutions outside the sphere of the state. The expansion of the state in the twentieth century threatened settler institutions though they were successfully defended. The midland community and its families were not as homogenous as they liked to pretend. They maintained a facade by excluding and silencing dissidents. This process was a necessary part of the creation of a myth which elevated old Natal families to positions of social status and prestige.
States of mind : mental illness and the quest for mental health in Natal and Zululand, 1868-1918.
(2004) Parle, Julie.; Burns, Catherine E.
In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, many of those who search for solace from mental illness draw on one or more of the three vigorous therapeutic traditions of healing to which the region is heir. Western psychiatry and its formal institutions have a long history in this region: in 1868, the Colony of Natal passed southern Africa's first 'lunacy legislation'; and in 1880, the Natal Government Asylum was opened on the Town Hill, Pietermaritzburg. Although founded on the precepts of nineteenth century liberalism, by 1910, the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital (as it was now known) increasingly reflected a national concern with a racialised 'mental science' and Natal psychiatry became somewhat marginalized within a broader network of national asylum administration. During World War 1, too, the white citizens of Pietermaritzburg sought to have future expansion of the asylum halted, and its inmates hidden from public view. Although the story of Western psychiatry in Natal and Zululand is important for any history of mental illness in South Africa, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial psychiatry had relatively limited significance for the majority of people. Since the nineteenth century, African understandings of and treatments for illness have proved especially resilient, interacting with and at times adopting - and adapting - elements of Western biomedicine, as well aspects of healing strategies whose origins lie in Indian concepts of health and medicine first brought with indentured workers from the 1860s. For whites, as well as for Africans and Indians, committal to the asylum came, most typically, at the end of a lengthy quest to find a cure for mental illness. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other sectors of healing proved to be remarkably flexible, offering new explanations for apparently new forms of illness - including insanity - that accompanied the political, economic and social upheavals of the time, as well as producing new therapies, strategies, and specialists to meet them. It is this variety of responses to mental illness, and ways of attempting to negotiate a path to a state of mind that might be termed 'mental health', that this dissertation traces.
Our victory was our defeat : race, gender and liberalism in the union defence force, 1939-1945.
(2006) Chetty, Suryakanthie.; Du Toit, Marijke.; Burns, Catherine E.
The Second World War marked the point at which South Africa stood at a crossroads between the segregation which came before it and apartheid that came after. Over the past twenty years social historians have placed greater focus on this particular period of the Second World War in South Africa's history. This thesis takes this research as its starting point but moves beyond their more specific objectives (evident in the research on the war and medical services) to explore the South African experience of race and gender and, to some extent, class during the war and the immediate post-war era. This thesis has accorded this some importance due to the state's attempts, during and after the war, to control and mediate the war experience of its participants as well as the general public. Propaganda and war experience are thus key themes in this dissertation. This thesis argues that the war and the upheaval it wrought allowed for a re-imagining of a new post-war South Africa, however tentatively, that departed from the racial and gendered inequality of the past. This thesis traces the way in which the exodus of white men to the frontlines allowed white women to take up new positions in industry and in the auxiliary services. Similarly for the duration of the war black men — and women - were able to take advantage of the relaxation of influx control laws and the new job opportunities opening up to move in greater numbers to the urban areas. As this thesis has shown, black men were able to take advantage of the opportunity to prove their loyalty by enlisting in the various branches of the Non-European Army Services. This allowed them to work alongside white men and was integral in their demands for equal participation which signified equal citizenship. The way in which the war has been remembered and commemorated as well as the expectations and silences around the potential for liberation which the war symbolised for many South Africans, has been largely unexplored. This was pardy due to the memorialisation of the war taking on a private, personal and hence, hidden aspect. This thesis examines this memorialisation in its broadest sense, particularly as it applies to black men, their families and their communities. The thesis concludes by arguing that, by 1948, the possibilities for a new South Africa had been closed down and would remain so for almost fifty years. The Second World War was relegated to personal memory and public commemoration as the "last good war", a poignant reminder of a vision of equality which was not to be.

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