intensified social divisions
among Africans. Mission-educated
clergy and teachers, and successful
peasants, formed a new hierarchy in competition with the old hierarchy of
chiefs.
To compound
the diversity of the Southern African population
still
further, the Natal government continued to import laborers from India to
such an extent that by the end of the century there were more Indians than
Whites in Natal. It was on behalf of the Indian traders that a young
London-trained
barrister, Mohandas
Gandhi, went to South Africa in
1893. In the next twenty-one years, Gandhi led several campaigns against
unjust laws in South Africa. Although he did not achieve decisive results
there, the technique of passive resistance that he developed in Natal and the
Transvaal would have profound effects on the British Raj in India, after he
returned home in 1914.4
Great Britain was deeply involved in all these transformations. During
the mid-nineteenth century, Britain had been by far the most urbanized and
industrialized country in the world, and British merchants had been able to
penetrate overseas markets without serious competition from foreigners
and without the need to invoke the state to support them with protective
tariffs or territorial annexations. After 1870, however, other countries were