4 - The labour market

Summary

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND DATA

Objectives

In Chapter 2 we examined the nature of the ‘extra-market operations’ by which settler-producers attempted to secure inputs into their production process and markets for their produce at prices favourable to them. But perhaps the most important ‘extra-market operations’ of all were those carried out in the market for an input so far not discussed, namely African labour. These gained much prominence in the literature following Arrighi's insistence (1973 (D2)) that in Southern Rhodesia ‘unlimited supplies of labour’, so far from existing as a state of nature in the pre-colonial economy, were in fact created by such operations. Subsequent work on the colonial labour market (Clarke 1975 (C)), van Zwanenberg 1971 (C), Phimister 1974 (D2), van Onselen 1976 (D2)) has intensified the focus on these operations, using in the third of these cases a regional and in the fourth an industrial emphasis. However, these studies are deficient in at least two respects. Firstly, they offer very little statistical evidence for the period before 1945: only Arrighi, for example, puts forward any time series for wages during this period. Secondly, none of them works with a formal economic model. The purpose of this chapter is to try and make good some of these deficiencies of fact and theory.