The Cowboy Capitalist: John Hays Hammond, the American West, and the Jameson Raid in South Africa

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

by Charles van Onselen, Robert E. May (Foreword)

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering.

In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

772 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 20, 2018

About the author

Charles van Onselen was educated at the Universities of Rhodes and Oxford. He has written extensively on 19th and 20th century South Africa. In 1983, his work on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand won the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize for outstanding achievement in Commonwealth and Imperial history.

He is a well-known critic of Afrikaner nationalism whose earlier works include Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1914 and The Small Matter of a Horse: the Life of Nongoloza Mathebula, 1869-1948 and New Babylon, New Nineveh. In 1995, his biography of the life and times of Kas Maine, a black sharecropper, The Seed is Mine, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.

In 2012 he was Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.