Indian business in South Africa after apartheid: New and old trajectories

We have placed the story of Indian business in KwaZulu Natal during the 1990s within the context of its own community and South African history from the beginning of indenture in the 1860s. These local and national histories participate in the movement of world history, of what we have called "the long twentieth century." South Africa, far from being exceptional as has often been claimed, has been an extreme example of some of the central tendencies of that history. The world economy may now be returning to a more open phase, after a century in which an often repressive state capitalism turned society inwards, thereby restricting-even breaking up-the potential for a shared human consciousness. The racial divisions imposed by western imperialism in the late nineteenth-century are still with us in the form of sharply segregated sectors of high- and low-paid work, sustained by vastly discrepant scales of investment and technology. This dualism is striking within South Africa, which essentially constitutes a microcosm of global inequality at close and uncomfortable quarters; yet the juxtaposition of opposites may offer more hope for progress than the previous version of a closed and more divisive political economy.