William Beinart

Research

A book with Karen Brown on local knowledge about livestock management and veterinary ideas: African Local Knowledge and Livestock Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa (2013).  Funded by the ESRC, this research took him back to Mpondoland, where he interviewed in earlier years on agrarian history and rural politics.  See here for further information about the project and for the outreach report. 

 

An edited collection with Karen Middleton and Simon Pooley, Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination (2013) which grew out of a workshop in Oxford in 2011.

 

An A-level text book on South Africa 1948-94 with Ed Teversham in the new A-level stream on Searching for Rights and Freedoms in the Twentieth Century (2015)

 

Exploring the ideas of bioinvasion, biodiversty and biocultural diversity from an African perspective.

 

Transcript of Witness Workshop on the Mandela Campaigns, History of Anti-Apartheid Movement.

A British Academy funded project on the history of wildlife film and photography on Africa; a chapter on Hollywood in East Africa was published in Wild Things.

 

Agrarian history, rural governance and land reform in South Africa.  His latest paper, given in Oxford in April, focussed on a series of court judgements that are developing a concept of indigenous ownership in the former homelands of South Africa.  He has also completed a paper with Matthew de la Hey: ‘Why have South African Smallholders Largely Abandoned Arable Production: A Case Study’.   

See  Matthew de la Hey William Beinart

Why Have South African Smallholders Largely Abandoned Arable Production in Fields? A Case Study

 

Our article concerns the decline in arable production in the former homelands of South Africa – part of a longer-term trend that has probably accelerated since the mid-1990s. Our material is taken largely from interviews in Mbotyi village on the Eastern Cape coast, where rainfall is high. Even here, arable fields have largely been left fallow in recent years. Our interviews confirm that people in Mbotyi believe that there has been a marked and sharp decline in cultivation. While the general phenomenon that we are exploring is quite widely accepted in academic literature, explanations are less certain and it is difficult to rank the causes. Our aim is to contribute to this debate by considering especially people’s own perceptions. An investigation on a micro-scale allows for a multi-faceted analysis of the range of issues that confront cultivation in Mbotyi – a complex mix of disincentives that includes environmental problems, cost and risk, declining patriarchy and changing attitudes to work. We believe that it is important to engage with popular perspectives and understandings of these issues. Our analysis places at its centre a shortage of labour for agricultural purposes, despite high unemployment in the village. We conclude by suggesting some of the implications of this analysis for land reform and the priorities for agricultural polics.

 

For access to article:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1265336

For additional web articles see the website: www.gga.org under the heading Research and Knowledge: Land Programme

Publications

William Beinart and Ed Teversham, South Africa, 1948-94: From Apartheid State to ‘Rainbow Nation’ (2015) is part of the new A-level stream on Searching for Rights and Freedoms in the Twentieth Century.  South Africa is studied together with the United States. The major focus is on the black political struggle in these years, although there is also some content on apartheid policies, white society and the international, especially British, engagement with South Africa.  At about 70,000 words of text, the treatment is quite detailed. We researched the sections on black politics anew and tried to reflect some of the latest findings, including recent books, as well as Oxford doctoral theses by Julian Brown, Tim Gibbs, Anne Heffernan, Ollie Murphy and others.  We benefitted from the South African Discussion group series on Mandela, organised by Khumisho Moguerane, and from Colin Bundy’s new short biography of Mandela.

The syllabus and the title was prescribed before the text was written.  We could not debate this with those responsible and the series editors were keen that we stuck as closely as possible to the content and sequence of the specifications.  They wish to be sure that teachers use the book.  So we had to compromise on a number of sections and also had to cut most of the comparative material, and some of the conceptual material, because this was not in the specifications.  There are of course many ways to write the history of this period in South Africa and we are reasonably happy with the result.  There are even brief sections on our areas of particular interest such as the Mpondoland revolt and the Kruger National Park – despite their absence from the specs.  So there was ugh flexibility to include most of our main concerns and some of our idiosyncratic interests.

 

William Beinart and Karen Brown, African Local Knowledge and Livestock Health published by James Currey 2013

Understanding local knowledge has become a central academic project among those interested in Africa and developing countries. In South Africa, land reform is gathering pace and African people hold an increasing proportion of the livestock in the country. Animal health has become a central issue for rural development. Yet African veterinary medical knowledge remains largely unrecorded. This book seeks to fill that gap. It captures for the first time the diversity, as well as the limits, of a major sphere of local knowledge.

Beinart and Brown argue that African approaches to animal health rest largely in environmental and nutritional explanations. They explore the widespread use of plants as well as biomedicines for healing. While rural populations remain concerned about supernatural threats, and many men think that women can harm their cattle, the authors challenge current ideas on the modernisation of witchcraft. They examine more ambient forms of supernatural danger expressed in little-known concepts such as mohato and umkhondo. They take the reader into the homesteads and kraals of rural black South Africans and engage with a key rural concern - vividly reporting the ideas of livestock owners. This is groundbreaking research which will have important implications for analyses of local knowledge more generally as well as effective state interventions and animal treatments in South Africa. See here for more information about the project.

 

 William Beinart, Karen Middleton and Simon Pooley (eds,), Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination assembles eleven substantive and original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century.

The book is  published by The White Horse Press, Cambridge and is available for purchase on their website.

- See more in the African Studies Centre news archive, academic year 12/13.

 

William Beinart and Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: The Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape, Wits University Press, 2012

While there are many studies of the global influence of crops and plants, this is perhaps the first social history based around a plant in South Africa. Plants are not quite historical actors in their own right, but their properties and potential help to shape human history. Plants such as prickly pear tend to be invisible to those who do not use them. This book explains why they were not peripheral to many people in the Eastern Cape and why a wild and sometimes invasive cactus from Mexico, which found its way around the world over 200 years ago, remains important to African women in shacks and small towns.

The central tension at the heart of this history concerns different and sometimes conflicting human views of prickly pear. Some accepted or enjoyed its presence; others wished to eradicate it. While commercial livestock farmers initially found the plant enormously valuable, they came to see it as a scourge in the early twentieth century as it invaded farms and commonages. But for impoverished rural and small town communities of the Eastern Cape it was a godsend. In some places it still provides a significant income for poor black families. Debates about prickly pear -  and its cultivated spineless variety -  have played out in unexpected ways over the last century and more.  Some scientists, once eradicationists, now see varieties of spineless cactus as plants for the future, eminently suited to a world beset by climate change and global warming.  

The book also addresses central problems around concepts of biodiversity.  How do we balance, on the one hand, biodiversity conservation with, on the other, a recognition that plant transfers and species transfers more generally - have been part of dynamic production systems that have historically underpinned human civilizations.  American plants such as maize, cassava and prickly pear have been used to create incalculable value in Africa.  Transferred plants are at the heart of many agricultural systems, as well as hybrid botanical and cultural landscapes, sometimes treasured, that are unlikely to  be entirely reversed. Some of these plants displace local species, but are invaluable for local livelihoods. Prickly Pear explores this dilemma over the long term and suggests that there must be a significant cultural dimension to ideas about biodiversity.

 

Beinart, William and Marcelle C Dawson (eds). Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010.

This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It looks at continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? Posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994 raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and 'history from below' and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remain significant in South Africa and help influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.

 

William Beinart and Lotte Hughes Environment and Empire, Oxford University Press, 2007
European imperialism was extraordinarily far-reaching - the precursor of globalization as we now understand it. Imperialism was inseparable from the history of global environmental change. Environment and Empire illustrates diverse environmental themes in the history of the British empire. It concentrates initially on the material factors that shaped empire and environmental change, as Britain sucked in resources that were gathered, hunted, fished, mined, and farmed in a great profusion of extractive systems.

Yet it is argues that British settler and colonial states sought to regulate the use of natural resources as well as commodify them. Conservation aimed to preserve resources by exclusion, as in wildlife parks and forests, or to guarantee efficient
use of soil and water. The tension between exploitation and conservation is a central theme in the book.

Environment and Empire also explores the comparative experience of colonized people, the history of environmentally related diseases, environmental sciences, visual representations of nature, and the environmental bootprint of colonial cities. Most chapters focus on colonized zones, from sugar production in the Caribbean and hunting in southern Africa, to oil in the Middle East, and the struggles of Aboriginal people in Australia. The study concludes with a focus on political reassertions by colonized peoples over natural resources. In a post-imperial age, they have found a new voice, reformulating ideas about nature and heritage, and challenging views of who has the right to resources.

 

William Beinart. The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770-1950, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
This book is an innovative contribution to the growing comparative field of environmental history. Beinart's major theme is the history of conservationist ideas in South Africa. He focuses largely on the livestock farming districts of the semi-arid Karoo and the neighbouring eastern Cape grasslands, conquered and occupied by white settlers before the middle of the nineteenth century. The Cape, like Australia, became a major exporter of wool. Vast numbers of sheep flooded its plains and rapidly transformed its fragile natural pastures. Cattle also remained vital for ox-wagon transport and internal markets. Concerns about environmental degradation reached a crescendo in the early decades of the twentieth century, when a Dust Bowl of kinds was predicted, and formed the basis for far-reaching state intervention aimed at conserving natural resources. Soil erosion, overstocking, and water supplies stood alongside wildlife protection as the central preoccupations of South African conservationists.

The book traces debates about environmental degradation in successive eras of South African history. It offers a reinterpretation of South Africa's economic development, and of aspects of the Cape colonial and South African states. It expands the understanding of English-speaking South Africans and their role both as farmers and as protagonists of conservationist ideas. The book is also a contribution to the history of science, exploring the way in which new scientific knowledge shaped environmental understanding and formed a significant element in settler intellectual life. It paints an evocative picture of the post-conquest Karoo, analysing the impact of self-consciously progressive farmers and officials in their attempts to secure private property, curtail transhumance and kraaling, control animal diseases, enhance water supplies, eradicate jackals, destroy alien weeds such as the prickly pear, and combat drought. It concludes by analysing conservationist interventions in the African areas, and discussing evidence for a stabilization of environmental conditions over the longer term.

 

Beinart, W. & J. McGregor (eds) Social history & African environments: James Currey; Ohio Univesity Press and D. Philip, 2003.
The recent explosion of interest in African environmental history has resulted in a rich new literature. This collection focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of the field, revealing the importance of standing back from today's controversies over the state of the African environment, to explore the historical contexts in which knowledge and ideas about nature, conservation and landscape were formed. It brings together essays on relations between the environmental ideas and practices of Africans, colonial officials, settlers and scientists, challenging some of the interpretive conventions of Africanist scholarship.

 

William Beinart, Twentieth-century South Africa, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
An innovative examination of the forces - both destructive and dynamic - which have shaped twentieth-century South Africa. This book provides a stimulating introduction to the history of South Africa in the twentieth century. It draws on the rich and lively tradition of radical history writing on that country and, to a greater extent than previous accounts, weaves economic and cultural history into the political narrative. Apartheid and industrialization, especially mining, are central theme, as is the rise of nationalism in the Afrikaner and African communities. But the author also emphasizes the neglected significance of rural experiences and local identities in shaping political consciousness. The roles played by such key figure as Smuts, Verwoerd, de Klerk, Plaatje, and Mandela are explored, while recent historiographical trends are reflected in analyses of rural protest, white cultural politics, the vitality of black urban life, and environmental decay. The book assesses the analysis of black reactions to apartheid, the rise of the ANC. The concluding chapter brings this seminal history up-to-date, tackling the issues and events from 1994-1999 - in particular the success of Mandela and the ANC in seeing through the end of apartheid rule. It also looks at the chances of a stable future for the new-found democracy in South Africa. 

Selected Publications

The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1982), xi + 218.

With Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890-1930 (James Currey, London; Ravan Press, Johannesburg; University of California Press, Berkeley 1987), xxvi + 326.

Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1994), xvi + 293.

With Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (Routledge, London, 1995), xi + 120.  Published in Chinese, 2009.

Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2001), second edition, xvii + 414.

The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770-1950 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003), xxiii + 425.

With Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), xii + 396.

With Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: the Social History of a Plant in South Africa, (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2011), ix + 268.

With Karen Brown, African Local Knowledge and Animal Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa (James Currey, Oxford and Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2013), xvi + 304.

William Beinart and Ed Teversham, South Africa, 1948-94: From Apartheid State to ‘Rainbow Nation’ in Edexcel AS/A Level History, Searching for Rights and Freedom in the 20th Century (Pearson, London, 2015), 284-401.

With Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido, Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850-1930 (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1986), xvi + 438.

The Politics of Conservation in Southern Africa, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), 143-392.

With Robert Turrell and Terence Ranger, Political and Collective Violence in Southern Africa, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 2 (1992), 455-707.

With Saul DubowSegregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Routledge, London, 1995), xii + 288.

With John McCracken and Debby Potts, Special Issue for Terry Ranger, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 2 (1997), 173-361.

With Jo Beall, JoAnn McGregor, Debby Potts and David Simon, African Environments: Past and Present, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 4 (2000), 595-855.

With Saul Dubow, Deborah Gaitskell and Isabel Hofmeyr, Special Issue for Shula Marks, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 27, 3 (2001), 391-658.

 With JoAnn McGregorSocial History and African Environments (James Currey, Oxford; David Philip, Cape Town; and Ohio University Press, Athens, 2003), xii + 275.

With Leslie Bank, Patrick McAllister and Gary Minkley (eds.), Land Reform and Rural Development in South Africas Eastern Cape, special issue of Social Dynamics, 31, 1 (2005), 1-280.

With Marcelle Dawson, Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa (University of Witwatersrand Press, 2010).

With Karen Middleton and Simon Pooley, Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination (White Horse Press, Isle of Harris, 2013), xi + 303.

With Karen Brown, Outreach Report: African Local Knowledge: Livestock Diseases and Treatments in South Africa, September 2012, 17 pages.

With Rosalie Kingwill, Eastern Cape Land Reform Pilot Project Pre-Planning Report, (Working Paper no. 25, Land and Agriculture Policy Centre, Johannesburg and Border Rural Committee, East London, 1995), 94 + xv.

With Colin Murray, Agrarian Change, Population Movements and Land Reform in the Free State (Working paper no. 51, Land and Agriculture Policy Centre, Johannesburg, 1995), 109.

Joyini Inkomo: Cattle Advances and the Origins of Migrancy from Pondoland, Journal of Southern African Studies, 5, 2 (1979), 199-219.

European Traders and the Mpondo Paramountcy, 1878-1886, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), 471-486.

Production and the Material Basis of Chieftaincy: Pondoland 1830-1880 in S. Marks and A. Atmore (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (Longman, London, 1980), 120-147.

Labour Migrancy and Rural Production: Pondoland c. 1900-1950 in P. Mayer (ed.), Black Villagers in an Industrial Society (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1980).

With Colin Bundy, `State Intervention and Rural Resistance: the Transkei 1900-1965 in M. Klein (ed.), Peasants in Africa (Sage, Beverly Hills, 1980), 271-315.

Conflict in Qumbu: Rural Consciousness, Ethnicity and Violence in the Colonial Transkei, Journal of Southern African Studies, 8, 1 (1981), 94-122.

Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: a Southern African Exploration, 1900-1960, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 11, 1 (1984), 52-83.

Agricultural Planning and the Late Colonial Technical Imagination: the Lower Shire Valley in Malawi, 1940-1960 in J.McCracken (ed.), Malawi: an Alternative Pattern of Development (Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1985), 93-148.

Chieftaincy and the Articulation of Modes of Production in South Africa, 1900-1950, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 19 (1985), 91-98.

Introduction (with Peter Delius) and Settler Accumulation in East Griqualand from the Demise of the Griqua to the Natives Land Act in Beinart, Delius and Trapido (eds.), Putting a Plough to the Ground (1986), 1-55 and 259-310.

Women in Rural Politics: Herschel District in the 1920s and 1930s in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1987), 324-357.

Ethnic Particularism, Worker Consciousness and Nationalism: the Experience of a South African Migrant, 1930-1960 in S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds.), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (Longman, London, 1987), 286-309.

Agrarian Historiography and Agrarian Reconstruction in J. Lonsdale (ed.), South Africa in Question (James Currey, London, 1988), 134-153.

Introduction: the Politics of Colonial Conservation, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), 143-162.

W.M. Macmillans Analysis of Agrarian Change and African Rural  Communities in H. Macmillan and S. Marks (eds.), Africa and Empire: W.M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Temple Smith, London, 1989), 168-191.

Transkeian Migrant Workers and Youth Labour on the Natal Sugar Estates 19181948, The Journal of African History, 32, 1 (1991), 41-63; and in Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (eds), White farms, Black labor : the state and agrarian change in Southern Africa, 1910-50  (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann ; Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, University of Natal Press ; Oxford, James Currey, 1997), 147-171.

Review Article: Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Southern and Central Africa, Past and Present, 128 (1990), 162-186.

Speaking for Themselves and The Origins of the Indlavini: Male Associations and Migrant Labour in the Transkei, African Studies, 50, 1 and 2 (1991), 11-38 and 103-128, fiftieth anniversary volume, special issue on Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa: Festschrift for Philip and Iona Mayer.

Political and Collective Violence in Southern African Historiography, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 3 (1992), 455-486.

Transkeian Smallholders and Agrarian Reform, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 11, 2 (1992), 178-199.

The Disappearance of Sharecropping: a South African Comparison in M. Stokes and R. Halpern (eds.), Race and Class in the American South since 1890 (Berg, Oxford, 1994), 111-118.

`Farmers Strategies and Land Reform in the Orange Free State, Review of African Political Economy, 61 (1994), 389-402.

With Saul Dubow, The Historiography of Segregation and Apartheid in Beinart and Dubow, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (1995).

Soil Erosion, Animals and Pasture over the Longer Term in M. Leach and R. Mearns (eds.), The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (James Currey, Oxford, 1996), 54-72.

 Vets, Viruses and Environmentalism: the Cape in the 1870s and 1880s, Paideuma, 43 (1997), 227-252; and in T. Griffiths and L. Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh, Keele University Press, 1997), 87101.

`Strategies of the Poor and Some Problems of Land Reform in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, in Theunis D. de Bruyn and Peter F. Scrogings (eds.), Communal Rangelands in South Africa: a Synthesis of Knowledge (University of Fort Hare, Alice, 1998), 81-92.

`Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Cape, Journal of  Southern African Studies, 24, 4 (1998), 775-799.

The Night of the Jackal: Sheep, Pastures and Predators in the Cape, Past and Present, 158 (1998), 172-206.

African History, Environmental History and Race Relations, Inaugural Lecture (Oxford University Press, 1999); extended version `African History and Environmental History, African Affairs, 99, 395 (2000), 269-302.

The Renaturing of African Animals: Film and Literature in the 1950s and 1960s, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 27 (2001), 201-226; and in Paul Slack (ed) Environments and historical change: The Linacre Lectures, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999),

`Environmental Origins of the Pondoland Revolt and `South African Environmental History in the African Context in Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest (eds.), South Africas Environmental History, Cases and Comparisons (Ohio University Press, Athens; David Philip, Cape Town, 2002), 76-89 and 215-226.

With Luvuyo Wotshela, `Prickly Pear in the Eastern Cape since the 1950s perspectives from interviews, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 29 (2003), 191-209.

With Karen Middleton, `Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: a Review Article, Environment and History, 10, 1 (2004), 3-29.

With Karen Middleton, `Cactus Pear as Dryland Fodder: Ambovombe Farm, Madagascar and Wellwood Farm, South Africa Compared, c.1920-1950 Journal of Agrarian Change 5, 2 (2005), 251-280.

Transhumance, Animal Diseases and Environment in the Cape, South Africa, South African Historical Journal, 58 (2007), 17-41.

With Karen Brown and Dan Gilfoyle, Experts and Expertise in Africa Revisited, African Affairs, 108 (2009), 413-33.

With Katie McKeown, Wildlife Media and Representations of Africa, 1950s-1970s, Environmental History, 14, 3 (2009), 429-53.

Strategies of the Poor and Some Problems of Land Reform in the Eastern Cape, South Africa: An Argument against Recommunalisation in Timothy Chesters (ed.), Land Rights (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), 177-201.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JOQscXNUWLwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA177&dq=william+beinart&ots=wZrZPTPFrI&sig=kEeGWRSBVGl13ar

Ecological Imperialism, Plant Transfers, and African Environmental History, Nova Acta Leopoldina, 98, 360 (2009), 133-142.

FYI Workshop: Some Comparative Comments, African Studies, 69, 2 (2010), 219-227.

‘Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa, 1970-2008’ in Beinart and Dawson (eds.), Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa (Johannesburg, 2010), 1-30.

‘The Mpondo Revolt through the Eyes of Leonard Mdingi and Anderson Ganyile’ in Thembela Kepe and Lungisile Ntsebeza (eds.),  Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years (Brill, Leiden, 2011), 91-114.

‘Beyond Homelands: Some Ideas about the History of the African Rural Areas in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 64, 1 (2012), 5-21.

With Karen Brown and Andrew Ainslie, ‘Animal Disease and the Limits of Local Knowledge: Dealing with Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases in South Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute19, 2 (2013), 319-337.

With Karen Middleton and Simon Pooley, ‘Introduction. Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination’ in Beinart, Middleton and Pooley (eds.), Wild Things (2013), 1-23.

With Dominique Schafer, ‘Hollywood in Africa, 1947-1962: Imaginative Construction and Landscape Realism’ in Beinart, Middleton and Pooley (eds.), Wild Things (2013), 44-66.

With Peter Delius, ‘The Historical Context and Legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 4 (2014), 667-688.  Shorter version published in Ben Cousins and Cherryl Walker (eds.),  Land Divided, Land Restored; Land Reform in South Africa for the 21st Century (Jacana, Cape Town, 2015)

‘A Century of Migrancy from Mpondoland’ in Peter Delius, Laura Phillips and Fiona Rankin-Smith (eds.), A Long Way Home: Migrant Worker Worlds 1800 – 2014 (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2014); extended version published in  African Studies, 73, 3 (2014), 387-409.

Plant Transfers, Bio-invasions and Biocultural Diversity: Perspectives from Africa’, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Paper, Perspectives in Indian Development, New Series 42 (New Delhi, 2014).

‘Terence Ranger as Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 5 (2015), 1108-1115.