AFRICANWARSAND WHITEINVADERS
temperate climate, the entire region had attracted a minute proportion of
Europe's emigrants, capital investment, and overseas trade. It contained
only about 250,000 people regarded as white; more than a hundred times
as many lived in the United States. Most members of the white population
depended on numerous imported commodities-not
only clothing, hard-
ware, guns, and gunpowder but such foodstuffs as coffee,tea, flour, and
sugar. Even so, the total value of imports was only about £3 million a year.
Exports-mostly
in the form of wool and ostrich feathers from the eastern
districts of the Cape Colony-amounted
to rather less than that. In 1870,
furthermore, the annual revenuesof the four white states amounted to only
about £750,000-nearly
three-quarters of that being the Cape Colonial
revenue. Cape Town, in the extreme southwestern corner, with nearly
50,000 inhabitants (about half of them white), was the only town of more
than 30,000. Durban and Pietermaritzburg had fewer than 7,000 inhabi-
tants each; the highveld towns were smaller still. In the entire region, there
were only 70 miles ofrailroad track; there were 38,000 in the United States.
Nevertheless, by 1870 the region was poised to take advantage of the