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Two collections of essays by historians and historical geographers enrich this argument by focusing on struggles that took place in less visible sectors of the economy, nooks and crannies where African workers tended to be even more exploited and vulnerable than in the mines. Liquor and Labor, first, contains fifteen chapters covering much of the region, from the Zambian Copperbelt to the vineyards of the Cape to South Africa's giant urban centres. They range in time from 1658, when the Dutch governor at Cape Town recommended a daily glass of brandy to \"animate\" slaves toward Christianity, up to the 1980s, when giant corporations wiped out small-scale brewers with their mass-produced cartons of sorghum beer. The principal focus lies in the period from the turn of the 19th century to the early 1960s, when struggles to capture a cheap African labour force were most intense. The authors analyze both the changing ways that capital sought to use alcohol to capture and control its work force, and the protean ways that Africans resisted those controls. The role of liquor in southern African society, and in particular its ability to crystallize early resistance to the state by African women, has been the theme of several important studies. The essays here build on these works and comparative studies from elsewhere -- the introduction by Ambler and Jeeves has 180 footnotes. They also show how the startling diversity of policies toward alcohol can be linked to struggles between different groups of capitalists. Given the particular nature of coal mining in Natal, for example, mine owners tended to favour a system where their workers were \"stabilized\" by running up debts for drinking in company-owned canteens (Ruth Edgecombe). In Johannesburg, however, where mine owners found 15-20 per cent of their workers incapacitated by alcohol each day, there were early attempts to impose total prohibition (Julie Baker). At the Cape, poorer farmers clung to the ancient \"tot system\" (two quarts of reject wine per day in lieu of cash) long after more capitalized farmers sought to modernize (Pamela Scully). African drinking traditions also evolved over time reflecting class and generational conflict over who controlled mine workers' incomes (Patrick McAllister). One consistent theme of the various chapters is that pre-industrial forms of agricultural practice may have been exploitative and violent but they did give Africans room to negotiate for tolerable working conditions. These practices began to be replaced by more modern relations of production in the post-World War I era. Labour tenancy was phased out and migrant labour compounds modelled on the mines were phased in. Fully proletarianized farm workers were then exposed to ever harsher working and living conditions. At the heart of South Africa's most productive maize-growing area in the 1940s, to illustrate, Martin Murray cites a labour inspector who found that 75 per cent of all workers bore scars from beatings at work. Charles Mather shows how \"progressive\" farmers reduced costs by paying wages but deducting spurious fines. Hostels in Natal are directly implicated in the malaria epidemics of the late 1920s (Alan Jeeves). In 1928-29, for example, an estimated 3,000 African workers died of malaria on the sugar plantations (William Beinart).