The field of Black studies typically focuses on plantation societies in the Western Hemisphere to examine Black experiences and theorize Blackness. Yet another extractive economic regime played an equally significant role in shaping Black life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: mining. In the wake of discoveries of diamonds and gold in South Africa, racialized social, political, and economic structures arose to compel Black labor and enable mineral extraction.

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi offers a new literary and intellectual history of global Blackness and its relationship to two regimes of racial capitalism: the Plantation and the Mine. She reads the print culture of Cape Town, which became a Black hub around the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals, activists, artists, and leaders from the Caribbean, the United States, and other parts of Africa flocked to the port city. A liberatory future beckoned—until it was foreclosed by repressive legislation in the 1910s and the 1948 imposition of apartheid, which sought to sever South Africa from transnational Black networks. Collis-Buthelezi argues that the loss of Cape Town as a global Black city made anticolonial nationalism seem inevitable, curtailing prospects for envisioning freedom beyond the nation-state. Reconstructing a lost history of global Black radicalism, Black Liberation Under Late Empire demonstrates that to understand anticolonial and antiracist struggle in the twentieth century and today, we must understand what happened in Cape Town.