On the Witwatersrand, the individual digger was soon eliminated. Cap-
ital and large-scale organization were required to extract the gold from the
ore and to mine below the surface. By 1888, joint-stock companies were
buying out small claim-holders along the line of the outcrops and purchas-
ing from the Afrikaner pastoral farmers the bare land above the dipping
reefs to the south. In the following year, mining industrialists formed the
Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines to advance their common interests. The
amalgamation process continued, but it stopped short of unifying the gold-
mining industry. In 1899, the 124. companies were divided among nine
groups controlled by European finance houses.
The gold-mining industry followed the Kimberley precedent of a racially
split labor force. Since the international gold standard set a fixed ceiling
price for gold, labor costs were the crucial variable in determining prof-
itability. The industry had a strong incentive to keep the proportion of
expensive white operators as low as possible, to exploit African labor as
fully as possible, and to prevent the two sections of the labor force from
combining. Two factors prevented the industry from being completely
successful in the nineteenth century. One was internal: the mining com-