South Africa’s future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book’s main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.
South Africa’s future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book’s main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.
This book rediscovers a remarkable South African life. James T Bain, hero and antihero of the South African past, has a claim to be the founder of trade unionism and socialism in South Africa. He started the first substantial trade unions in southern Africa on the Rand in the early 1890s. His International Independent Labour Party, founded in 1899, was the first socialist party in sub-Saharan Africa. He was a close associate of both the founders of the Communist Party and of the white segregationists of the South African Labour Party. But his political views, like much else about him, were complex: he often hesitated between democratic and racist ideas.