Technical innovation in agriculture preceded that in mining, and the value of colonial agricultural production exceeded that of diamonds throughout the nineteenth century. After the Cape received responsible government in 1874 a colonial scientific bureaucracy was gradually expanded to include a veterinary surgeon, a Department of Agriculture, and a state botanist, geologist, entomologist and marine biologist. The discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s reshaped the contours of race and science. Mining became reliant on increasingly sophisticated technology and on cheap black labour. Rapid growth in the mining sector has been analysed by historians in terms of the relationship between capital and labour. Scientific and technological innovations were also critical: applied geology, water pumps, explosives, stamping gear and the recently discovered cyanide process for gold extraction. The geostrategic importance of southern Africa became a point of growing competition, and the borders of a unitary South African state in 1910 emerged out of wars of conquest against African societies and intense conflict between English- and Dutch-speaking citizens. Imperial conquest and expansion were in turn associated with rapid technological change: steamships, railways, transatlantic cables and breech loading rifles. Together these constituted a ‘full-blown socio-technical imaginary’.

South Africa was a regional rather than a world power; it was not a global centre for invention or new scientific ideas. Yet its geographic position on the African continent made it a staging post for Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialism and part of a global imaginary. Colonisation by Britain brought the region into connection with a technologically advanced world empire. South Africa was at key moments an incubator and testing ground of innovation, which had profound social and economic effects on the country: agricultural technology underpinned exports of wool and ostrich feathers; new rifles changed the balance of power in favour of colonial regimes; the mineral revolution necessitated developments in applied geology and gold extraction. Key advances were often a response to urgent economic requirements, but the scientific imagination was also more exploratory with respect to astronomy, palaeontology, and wildlife conservation. And as a crucible of racial politics in the twentieth century, South Africa has long been seen as a social laboratory for the study of 'race relations'. We aim to illustrate the scientific imagination as an expression of human curiosity and ingenuity, to discuss the politics of science and to examine its imbrication with white political power.

The transfer of the Cape to British control in 1806 gave the region new geopolitical prominence and the Cape sea-route more importance as the colonial authorities sought to consolidate control of the hinterland. British colonisers legitimated their presence in the region by insisting on their commitment to civilisation, progress, better governance and scientific accomplishment. This included conquest of the Xhosa, the British settlement programme in 1820, and scientific institutions. African kingdoms were also changing rapidly as they absorbed new military technologies such as horses and firearms. In the 1820s, a Royal Observatory was sited at Cape Town to expand knowledge of astronomy in the southern hemisphere and help with navigation and mapping. In the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific networks and associations gained footholds in local colonial society leading to the establishment of a natural history museum, the revival of the botanical garden and zoological expeditions. Geological exploration revealed fossils in the Karoo, prompting new thinking about the age of the earth. Flints and middens helped to catalyse archaeology as a field of interest – as did rock art. The science of race, which slip-streamed in Darwin’s wake, was given impetus by imperial conquest in South Africa.

When the Dutch plunged into the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they brought with them both a new form of capitalism and fresh ways of looking at nature. Their sprawling seaborne empire turned Amsterdam and Leiden into centres for the collection of global knowledge. Colonised regions were systematically scoured for valuable natural resources and curiosities. Jan van Riebeeck, Simon van der Stel and Rijk Tulbagh, among other Cape governors, were keen amateur naturalists. The Cape’s natural diversity in plants and animals attracted literate travellers with a scientific bent and the botanical gardens served as a portal to exchange of botanical knowledge. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced a rich literature on South Africa, as scientific interest drew it into the orbit of educated Europeans. Some of the writers became scientists of consequence, including Thunberg, who became the leading botanist in Sweden; Lichtenstein, a professor of zoology in Berlin; and Barrow, a key scientific figure in the British Admiralty. These travellers often reported local knowledge and collectively created a literary tradition about the Cape that helped to define the region’s character and interest to scientists.