That insight sits at the centre of Ashman’s study of racial capitalism and what scholars call uneven and combined development. The phrase sounds technical, but its basic idea is straightforward. Capitalism does not move every society along the same road, through the same stages, at the same speed. Different places become connected while remaining profoundly unequal. Old and new forms of economic life can be fused together, producing arrangements that would never appear on a simple ladder from “traditional” to “modern”.

South Africa offers a powerful example. In the late nineteenth century, the discovery of vast gold deposits transformed the region. Gold mattered to an international monetary system in which it helped to underpin currencies and global commerce. Extracting South Africa’s deep, relatively low-grade deposits profitably, however, required a dependable supply of cheap labour. The solution that emerged was a tightly controlled migrant labour system rather than a free labour market in the ordinary sense.

Workers were recruited from across Southern Africa and from areas within South Africa designated as African reserves. Many lived in compounds near the mines and worked on contracts before being compelled to return to rural areas. Pass laws restricted the movement of Black workers, while recruitment practices helped prevent miners from simply moving to employers offering better wages. The modern gold industry, in other words, depended on forms of coercion that theories of economic progress often associate with an earlier age.

This is one reason the South African story matters far beyond South Africa. A familiar account of capitalist development imagines coercion gradually giving way to freely contracted wage labour. Yet here, industrial expansion and international finance were combined with racialised controls over where people could live, travel and work. Modernity did not sweep older forms of domination away and instead reorganised and used them.

Racial categories became embedded in the practical organisation of labour, land, citizenship and political power. Ashman argues that class and race should not be treated as rival explanations. The point is to understand how they became joined in particular historical circumstances, and how that relationship could change.

The migrant system also reached beyond the mine shaft. Keeping wages low depended partly on pushing many of the costs of sustaining workers and families onto rural households. Men could spend long periods working far from home, while women, children and older people remained in the reserves. The economy’s celebrated mineral wealth was therefore linked to an often hidden geography of care, separation and unpaid work. Seen this way, South Africa’s inequalities were connected parts of a single historical process.

That process hardened during the twentieth century. Segregation laid foundations that apartheid would expand after 1948, turning racial discrimination into an extraordinarily ambitious system for controlling land, movement, residence and political rights. The migrant labour model spread beyond mining, while hostels housed workers who were officially treated as temporary visitors in cities where many spent much of their working lives. Economic development did not dissolve racial control and for decades, the two developed together.

This history also complicates the comforting distinction between “free” and “unfree” labour. A worker may receive wages and sign a contract while still facing severe restrictions over movement, residence and bargaining power. Rather than imagining freedom and coercion as opposites, the South African experience suggests a spectrum. Capitalist economies have repeatedly combined different kinds of labour, including arrangements shaped by legal force, economic necessity and unequal political power.

The same perspective changes how we think about the household. Conventional accounts of industrialisation often picture workers settling with their families near factories and mines. South Africa followed another path. Migrant workers were separated from families for long periods, while rural communities carried much of the responsibility for raising children, maintaining households and supporting workers between contracts. African women bore a particularly heavy share of this burden. What happened in the countryside therefore helped make the industrial economy possible.

Yet the system was never perfectly stable. As manufacturing expanded, employers increasingly needed a settled and skilled African workforce. Workers organised, resisted and challenged the structures designed to control them. Mass strikes in 1973, the growth of trade unions, student resistance and the urban uprisings and strikes of the 1980s all contributed to forces that eventually brought apartheid to an end.

Democracy, however, did not automatically erase structures built over generations. South Africa’s elite has become more racially diverse, including wealthy Black South Africans, while poverty and working-class disadvantage remain overwhelmingly concentrated among the Black majority. This is precisely why Prof. Sam Ashman’s emphasis on changing relationships between race and class matters. Racial capitalism is not a frozen system with one permanent form. Political institutions, labour arrangements and racial identities can change while deep inequalities persist.

The larger lesson reaches beyond one country. Global capitalism has never developed by simply replacing everything old with something new. It connects societies with different histories, reorganises existing inequalities and creates new combinations of wealth and deprivation, freedom and coercion, technological sophistication and social exclusion. Race and gender are intrinsic to that story. They have helped shape who performs particular kinds of work, who carries its hidden costs and who receives its rewards.

South Africa makes these connections unusually visible because its history is so stark. Gold linked the country to global finance while racial controls supplied the labour that made extraction profitable. Rural households sustained workers whose urban presence was deliberately restricted. Apartheid formalised inequalities that economic modernisation did not simply wash away.

Understanding this history changes the question we ask when confronted with extreme inequality. Instead of wondering why some people have been left behind by development, we can ask how prosperity and deprivation were produced together. That shift is the enduring power of uneven and combined development. It reminds us that sometimes inequality is woven into the way development itself has been made.