The South African mines drew a cosmopolitan mob unfit for settled industry

Evidence

THE DIAMOND FIELDS of Kimberley and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand happened to lie in this phantom world of race, and “a land that had seen boat-load after boat-load of emigrants for New Zealand and Australia pass it unheeding by now saw men tumbling on to its wharves and hurrying up country to the mines. Most of them were English, but among them was more than a sprinkling from Riga and Kiev, Hamburg and Frankfort, Rotterdam and San Francisco.” All of them belonged to “a class of persons who prefer adventure and speculation to settled industry, and who do not work well in the harness of ordinary life… [There were] diggers from America and Australia, German speculators, traders, saloonkeepers, professional gamblers, barristers…, ex-officers of the army and navy, younger sons of good families …a marvelous motley assemblage among whom money flowed like water from the amazing productiveness of the mine.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 512

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘phantom world of race’ phrase and the adventurer class connect to Arendt’s broader mob theory, relevant to the foundations module’s race-thinking thread.