Kevin R. Cox was born in England and taught at The Ohio State University for fifty years. His books include Making Human Geography (The Guilford Press, 2014) and The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception (Syracuse University Press, 2016).
Publication date: July 1, 2026
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix
Preface x
1 Capitalist Development, Geohistory and the Peculiarities
of South Africa 1
1 South Africa’s Peculiarity 3
2 Putting South Africa in Context 7
3 South Africa and the Global Political Economy 9
2 Creating ‘A Country’ 17
1 Introduction 17
2 The First Globalization and South Africa 20
3 An Institutional Fix for Gold 23
3.1 The Challenges 23
3.2 The Fix 25
3.3 Labor’s Racial Hierarchy 31
3 Apartheid and Giving New Life to ‘South Africa’ 38
1 Introduction 38
2 The Context 39
3 Apartheid 46
4 An Assessment 56
4 In the Eye of the Storm and the End of the Beginning 62
1 Introduction 62
2 From the Golden Years to the Long Downturn 65
3 ‘Globalization’ 71
4 Confronting Decolonization 77
5 Interregnum 84
5 Decolonizing South Africa: A Hiding to Nothing 91
1 Introduction 91
2 An Audit of the New South Africa 92
2.1 Race and Material Conditions 92
2.2 The Skills Problem 97
2.3 Transitioning the State 103
3 South Africa and the International Division of Labor 107
viii Contents
3.1 ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Globalizations 109
3.2 The Neo-liberal Project 116
6 Zim- Lite? 120
1 Context 120
2 The Symptoms 121
2.1 Infrastructural Collapse 121
2.2 Social (Dis)Order 123
2.3 ‘Exit’ 126
3 Towards an Explanation 127
References 143
Index 150