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

Once again, Charles van Onselen offers us a remarkable book, though this one is especially ambitious and expansive. Through the exploits and experiences of John Hays Hammond relatively unknown but immensely consequential van Onselen reveals to us the political economy of late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalism and state formation as it should be seen: transnational, imperial and very much a product of alliances between states and private capitalists. Historians of South Africa, the United States and Mexico will see connections and a world they have never before glimpsed and understand a historical stage of globalisation in new ways. The Cowboy Capitalist is a brilliant contribution to historical scholarship as well as a reminder of van Onselens master story-telling and riddle solving.

Steve Hahn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, New York University

Charles van Onselens richly informative and gripping Cowboy Capitalist offers intrigue, betrayal and suspense worthy of a spy thriller in a deeply documented account of international entrepreneurial capitalism, labour exploitation and political conspiracy in the age of imperialism. Above all, this epic biography of California native John Hays Hammond enriches transnational history by illuminating the influence of American mining engineers, the US Souths filibustering past and San Franciscan/Western vigilantism on the infamous Jameson Raid in 189596 to overthrow Paul Krugers South African Republic. No one reading this mesmerising tri-continental tale will ever look at the US informal empire, the Boer republic or British imperialism in southern Africa in quite the same way again.

Robert May, Purdue University

The Cowboy Capitalist is one of those rare but exciting books that explode what we long believed we knew about a historical event and present us with a new and compelling reinterpretation that will rejuvenate and define future debate. There has long been tired consensus that the Jameson Raid of 1895 was a capitalist conspiracy hatched by Cecil Rhodes and the Rand mining magnates, with the tacit support of Downing, to impose their agenda on Krugers obscurantist republic. In his enthralling reassessment of the Jameson Raid, Charles van Onselen brings the hard-nosed but fascinatingly complex American entrepreneur John Hays Hammond to the fore. With his extensive holdings in the gold mines and with his important business and political connections in the United States, Hays Hammond was active in promoting the United States informal empire during the 1890s. Van Onselen shows that Hays Hammonds leading, but previously downplayed, role in planning the Jameson Raid was integral to this expansionist agenda, and he repositions the Jameson Raid as an international capitalist conspiracy in which US interests, alongside British ones, played a pivotal role.

John Laband, Wilfrid Laurier University

This is a fantastic read. Bloody hell. Charles van Onselen has given us a master class in historical revisionism. With forensic detail, a global cast and compelling argument, this book delivers a dynamic new history of the murky world of late nineteenth century imperialism in southern Africa, culminating in a new transnational history of the infamous Jameson Raid. John Hays Hammond has finally met his match.

Joanna Lewis, London School of Economics

This wonderfully readable book is also a work of profound scholarship by one of the finest historians working today. Charles van Onselen writes with a Tolstoyian control over complex narrative and the contested human condition. Justly famous for giving voice to the marginalised individuals and social classes in South Africa, here he brings alive the political and financial ruling classes who shaped an Anglo-American world of colonial empires and finance capital from the 1880s to the 1930s. His overt subject is the life of Californian John Hays Hammond (18551936) the entrepreneurial American millionaire, brilliant mining engineer, freebooting expansionist and ber political animal who played a crucial (yet curiously neglected) role in the Jameson Raid conspiracy. But his grand narrative sweeps over a fast-changing trans-Atlantic and African world through fifty years of Western colonialism, in which global ideologies of culture and capital, race and manifest destiny gripped the mindsets of generations. John Hays Hammond indeed personified this revolutionary capitalism in an era of geo-political transformations. While researching the Age of Rhodes, Kruger and Chamberlain might now seem like working an exhausted Rand mine, Charles van Onselen shows that we are only at the beginning of a new understanding of the modern South Africa story within the international dynamics of global history.

Deryck M Schreuder, University of Sydney

One version of the Jameson Raid that it was a British imperialist conspiracy to topple Paul Krugers Boer republic has stood for many years. Now, South Africas finest and most formidable historian has taken a swipe at the rock of historical certainty, splintering it. In this rich and complex revision of historical understanding of the botched coup of 1895, Charles van Onselens twist is to depict it as a testy, competing Anglo-American lunge at imperial expansion. Who knows, had the frontier posse of John Hays Hammond prevailed, the Transvaal might well have toppled into Washingtons paws as a southern African version of the Philippines or the Dominican Republic. Enjoyably argumentative, The Cowboy Capitalist displays in abundance the trademark talent of its author his blistering combination of depth, breadth, authoritative scholarship, combativeness and wit. A brilliant book which makes an old imperial story fresh and surprising, it will be essential reading both for those new to its topic and for those who think that they know the wider history of South Africa and America in the 1890s.

Bill Nasson, University of Stellenbosch

RECONSIDERATIONS IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN HISTORY

Richard Elphick, Editor

University of Virginia Press

Originally published in 2017 by Jonathan Ball Publishers,

South Africa, a division of Media24 (Pty) Ltd

Text 2017 by Charles van Onselen

Published edition 2017 by Jonathan Ball Publishers

Foreword 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First University of Virginia Press edition published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4131-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4136-3 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg

Maps by Philip Stickler

List of Maps

Foreword

I n retracing the colorful life of turn-of-the-twentieth-century mining engineer and revolutionary capitalist John Hays Hammond, Charles van Onselen provides an exemplary transnational biography, a spinoff of a genre of historical writing known as transnational history that has been increasingly gaining traction in recent years. Rejecting ethnocentric fixations with their own countries histories, transnational historians trace how institutions, technologies, ideas, and peoples of one country cross boundaries into others, and the transformations those intersections inspire. Van Onselens marvelously researched and often gripping tri-continental narrative reveals how one native San Franciscan exemplified the transnational process in northwestern Mexicos state of Sonora and especially in southern Africa.