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Dossier: Transactional Spaces

Gold Standard Exploits: Bank Building in Colonial Johannesburg

Les frasques de l'étalon or : les banques du Johannesburg colonial
G. A. Bremner

Résumé

In 1862 the Standard Bank of British South Africa was formed in London. A so-called imperial bank, its growth became synonymous with that of South Africa itself. It achieved a dominant position during the Transvaal gold boom of the 1880s, where its presence on the Rand saw it go from a mere canvas tent in 1886 to a hulking, six-storey neo-Baroque “palace” of stone in 1908, setting new standards in banking architecture. Huge profits were to be had in Johannesburg for those institutions that could position themselves as indispensable to the goldmining economy. There were heavy risks involved, but by the mid-1890s the Standard’s Transvaal operation was contributing 40 percent of the bank’s overall profits. Its Johannesburg branch not only boasted the biggest banking hall in the world, but was at the forefront of financial instrument technology, including an in-house assay and smelting operation and facilities for the safe storage of bullion. Yet, the bank was an enabler of workplace exploitation of white, black, and imported Chinese coolie labour, encouraging social tensions through the exacerbation of capitalist competition. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, and Patrick Joyce’s ideas concerning institutional structuring and “performance,” this article considers the socio-economic dimensions of the Standard’s operation in relation to its architectural formation.

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Entrées d’index

Index géographique :

Afrique, Transvaal, Afrique du Sud, Johannesburg

Index chronologique :

XIXe siècle
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Texte intégral

  • 1 See Chapter 7 in G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edward (...)
  • 2 Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850-191 (...)

1In my recent book Building Greater Britain, I dedicated a chapter to financial institutions.1 This focused primarily on so-called imperial banks, the operations of which expanded significantly in Britain and the wider British world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Britain’s immense export of capital during this period is one of the most important phenomena in world history. Neither before nor since has a single nation committed so much of its national income and savings to foreign investment, nor derived so much of its revenue from overseas assets.2 In exploring here the category of financial institutions and their architecture, I will focus on one example in particular: the Standard Bank of British South Africa, formed in 1862. In so doing, I want to draw out the aesthetic, political, and economic implications of the Bank’s head office building in Johannesburg as it relates to international finance, the mining industry, and labor relations on the Witwatersand goldfields (fig. 1). In this I will consider how we might interpret the building as a peculiarly appropriate structure in both facilitating and symbolizing the violent and racialized nature not only of the Witwatersrand mining industry but also its connection to the gold standard international monetary system.

Figure 1: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-07), South Africa, by William H. Stucke.

Figure 1: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-07), South Africa, by William H. Stucke.

Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.

Capital flows and institutional presence

  • 3 G. A. Leyds, A History of Johannesburg: The Early Years, Beperk: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1964, p. 264 (...)
  • 4 Building News, 13 Nov. 1903, p. 676.
  • 5 Gerhard-Mark van der Waal, From Mining Camp to Metropolis: The Buildings of Johannesburg 1886-1940,(...)
  • 6 Clive M. Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture & Society 1880s-1960s, Cape Town: David Philip, (...)

2As a leading financial institution, the Standard Bank naturally associated its business prospects with its material presence. Bricks and mortar, on the ground, signaled purpose and intent. But how this material dimension presented itself also mattered. Following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s, the bank’s architectural ambitions became intimately tied to the evolving context of Johannesburg. The city had come under the influence of Alfred Milner, who, having been made governor of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), wasted little time in establishing an English-style municipal authority.3 Johannesburg grew rapidly during this post-war period, with its population swelling to over 200,000, and its expansion horizontally in terms of area was matched only by its rise vertically through ever-taller buildings. “The day of flimsy business structures on the Rand has passed,” reported the Building News in November 1903. With the establishment of much better railway connections, “massive structures of steel, stone, and brick are displacing tin shanties and jerry-built houses.”4 These “massive structures” were the ever-growing number of 5- to 8-story office blocks, banks, and clubs that had made the city’s central business district far more monumental, built in a substantial Edwardian classical style. Under the control of the new Town Council, Johannesburg now presented itself as a model of British imperial planning, touting its newfound solidity as corollary to a dynamic and profitable business environment.5 But this ordered regularity belied the divided nature of the city’s surrounding residential areas. These conurbations reflected the increasingly segregated class and race relations of the rapidly growing settlement, with separately designated white (poor and well-to-do), “Coolie,” and “Kaffir” locations.6 The latter consisted primarily of those crowded “shanties” so derided by the Building News.

  • 7 J. A. Henry, First Hundred Years of the Standard Bank, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 90 (...)

3The Standard Bank thrived in this context. Much of the bank’s success came through financing the mining industry: first diamonds at Kimberley in the Northern Cape, then gold on the Witwatersrand in Transvaal. From the late 1880s, Johannesburg quickly became an important business center for the bank. Huge profits were in the offing for those institutions that could position themselves as indispensable to trade. In the case of the Standard Bank, this consisted of offering reliable exchange, deposit, and bullion export services, as well as providing advances on working capital for mining companies (fig. 2).7 In providing all of these services, the Standard, if not cornering the market, certainly took a commanding position.

  • 8 Geoffrey Jones, British Multinational Banking 1830-1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • 9 Ibid., p. 27. This number had reached 1,286 by 1913. See Geoffrey Jones, “Competitive advantages in (...)
  • 10 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914, London; New (...)

4Indeed, the Standard Bank’s Johannesburg headquarters was a major hub in what had become the institution’s extended network of banking facilities spread across southern Africa, ranging as far north as Kenya (the bank only operated in Sub-Saharan Africa) (fig. 3). This regional network was plugged into international financial markets via the British imperial banking system, headquartered in London.8 So-called “imperial banks” were established either under Royal Charter or joint stock limited liability legislation to offer banking services in particular geographical regions of the world. The idea behind this type of banking operation was the facilitation of inter-imperial trade, the raising of capital (both in London and locally), and the financing of development through industry and infrastructure, commonly through government loans. By 1890 the number of such banks present in London totaled thirty-three, operating 710 overseas branches.9 Revenue streams through foreign investment were so large that Britain was effectively able to integrate large parts of the global economy under British leadership, with London standing proud as the world’s financial capital.10 As a result, demand for Britain’s currency Sterling was both high and widespread.

Figure 3: The South African branch distribution network of the Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. The black dots represent individual branches.

Figure 3: The South African branch distribution network of the Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. The black dots represent individual branches.

Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.

  • 11 George Thomas Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: R. Ma (...)
  • 12 J. A. Henry, First Hundred Years, op.cit. (note 7), p. 6-7.
  • 13 George Thomas Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, op. cit. (note (...)

5Being one of the largest and most successful of these banks, the Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., as it was initially known, had emerged onto the scene in October 1862. Its head office was in London, on Moorgate, with its chief regional office located at Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.11 From the very beginning, the Standard pursued an avowed policy of competitive acquisition of industry rivals, most of which were smaller, locally founded and operated banks throughout the territory, such as the Commercial Bank of Port Elizabeth, Colesberg Bank, and Beaufort West Bank.12 By 1877, after only fifteen years of operation, the Standard had seen off most major competition, including its principal London-based rival, the London and South African Bank (LSAB).13 With the LSAB out of the way, the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. (as it became known in 1883) went from strength to strength, quickly becoming one of the two biggest banks in the region.

  • 14 Eric A. Walker, A History of South Africa, London: Longmans, 1928, p. 353. See also J. A. Henry, Fi (...)

6The Standard Bank was therefore not only an instrument of capitalist speculation and accumulation but also, and importantly, an institution that served the broader developmental program of the British imperial state. It is worth recalling, as Eric Walker made clear in his History of South Africa (1928), that through its policy of region-wide expansion and banking integration, the Standard had driven the financial unification of South Africa far in advance of the political.14 This suggests a degree of supra-political power that gave the Standard agency in creating conditions favorable to its own growth and consolidation, including the formulation of legislation to protect its commercial interests.

Banker’s Baroque: the new El Dorado

7The nature of the Standard Bank’s operations on the Rand made its Johannesburg headquarters building a key facility for the provision of banking services, including the assaying of gold (fig. 4). The latter of these services was important in testing and thus ascertaining the purity and ultimate value of gold handed to the bank for processing and transportation. For this purpose, the building had assaying facilities, in close proximity to strong rooms (safes), in the basement and on the ground-floor mezzanine, which were accessed via isolate d stairs and dedicated cash and bullion elevators. It is no small irony, perhaps, that the large quantities of gold extracted from the Witwatersrand mines, having been brought to the surface at great effort and expense, were immediately returned underground for assessment in the bank’s basement. Indeed, the fact that the bank itself was partly excavated into this subterranean zone, charged as it was not only with the prospect of enrichment but also colonial entitlement, suggests a continuity of industry practice in terms of digging and “discovery.” These notionally connected spaces—mineshaft and building basement—were historically and mythically clouded in perceptions of hesitation, obscurity, and even fear. Both spaces were restrictive and therefore partly inscrutable, characteristic of the dissembling nature of the Witwatersrand mining industry itself.

Figure 4: Assaying equipment and environment: Assay Office, Bulawayo branch, Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. (1901).

Figure 4: Assaying equipment and environment: Assay Office, Bulawayo branch, Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. (1901).

Source: Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 194.

  • 15 Désirée Picton-Seymour, Historic Buildings in South Africa, Cape Town, Struikof Publishers, 1989, p (...)
  • 16 The Star, 5 Nov. 1908, p. 6. See also Gerhard-Mark van der Waal, From Mining Camp to Metropolis, op (...)

8But as sophisticated as these operations had become by the early twentieth century, the bank began life in rather more modest circumstances. Between 1886 and 1908, it went through no fewer than six premises, ranging from a £10 tent, first set up at Ferreira’s Camp, to a six-story, £180,000 mega-structure on the corner of Harrison and Commissioner streets. This ultimate manifestation represented perhaps the most spectacular “tent-to-palace” transformation in the history of Johannesburg banking architecture.15 Designed in 1905 by the English architect W. H. Stucke of the Johannesburg-based architectural firm Stucke & Bannister, when completed in 1907 the building was considered one of the finest and most important works of architecture in the city.16

  • 17 The original architectural drawings were destroyed, along with much of the early Stucke & Bannister (...)
  • 18 J. J. Bruwer, Johannesburg Municipality Heritage Survey Report (Cat. No. BC-3), “(Third) Standard B (...)
  • 19 For the idea that bank buildings signify financial stability, especially in the British tradition, (...)

9Architecturally, the building signified the strength and seriousness of its financial endeavor, with its towering hulk symbolizing the imperial cooperation and unity it fostered as an institution. Unfortunately, the origin of most of its construction materials is lost to history.17 But what is known is that the building comprised a steel frame on reinforced concrete foundations, encased in a façade of beige-colored Steenpan sandstone quarried near the banks of the Orange River (fig. 5).18 Much like the techniques of excavation employed in constructing the building’s subterranean basement, the quarrying of the stone that was required to sheath the structure in its impressive masonry veneer rooted both building and institution deeper in the region’s extractive economy. When complete, the bank’s sheer size, conspicuousness, and functional modernity as such marked it out as a structure of esteem in early twentieth-century Johannesburg, with its heavily-set, fortified appearance only adding to the sense of opacity surrounding many of the activities that took place within.19

Figure 5: Detail of exterior (upper level) of the Standard Bank headquarters, Johannesburg (1905-1907).

Figure 5: Detail of exterior (upper level) of the Standard Bank headquarters, Johannesburg (1905-1907).

Source: G. A. Bremner.

10Stylistically, the building is a prime specimen of so-called Edwardian Baroque. It was a style of architecture then in vogue across the British world, seen as signaling a certain bravado and renewed imperial determination (fig. 6).

Figure 6: Elevation drawing (1905), Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-7), by William H. Stucke.

Figure 6: Elevation drawing (1905), Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-7), by William H. Stucke.

Source: Stucke Bannister Archive [now destroyed]. Reproduced in Clive M. Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture & Society 1880s-1960s, Cape Town: David Philip, 1993, p. 57.

  • 20 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1).
  • 21 John Brydon quoted in ibid., p. 18.

11The muscular countenance of this architecture associated it with the great English Renaissance masters Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and John Vanbrugh, which in turn connected it to ideas of Englishness and wider British identity. These leading characteristics are observable in the overwrought detailing, such as protruding keystones, Gibbs surrounds to doors and windows, heavy cornicing, and the general sculptural effect of the façade. Calculated for visual impact, this type of architecture rippled with masculine vigor and intent, and was often described at the time as “manly.”20 It was precisely the kind of architecture that John Brydon, one of the style’s leading exponents, had earlier described as “firmly established as the national style,—the vernacular of the country[;] … an English Classical style as truly the embodiment of the civilisation and the life of the people[;] … a living, working, architectural reality, as much a part of England as its literature or its great school of painting.”21 In this sense, its masculine signifiers amplified the determination implied in the quest for British/Anglo-Saxon world order.

  • 22 David B. Sadighian, “The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento(...)
  • 23 For instance, see G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1), p. 79-121.

12It is worth pointing out that this kind of ebullient classicism was symptomatic of wider approaches to European colonial and post-colonial architecture at the time. Much like the capitalist endeavors underpinning the reconstruction of South Africa following the Boer War, attempts at refashioning the post-slavery economy in Brazil through architecture spoke to similar anxieties concerning racial purity and civilizational stewardship. As David Sadighian has argued, in fin de siècle Rio de Janeiro, for example, an appeal was made to French Beaux-Arts sophistication, channelled via the architectural paraphrasing of known masterworks, such as Garnier’s Paris Opéra, which sought to project an image of social and economic development for the purposes of attracting international investment.22 In a highly competitive domain, the perception of stability through a clear developmental trajectory was key. Other examples include the coincidence of this kind of architecture in Australia with the passing into law of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, better known as the “white Australia” policy.23 Such examples place the Standard Bank building and its ‘baroque’ posturing in an international milieu where architecture sought agency in not only encouraging and injecting flows of global capital, but also in racializing its outcomes. Indeed, in South Africa, Herbert Baker’s famous Union Buildings (1910-1913) would soon rise in Pretoria, the architectural centrepiece of the new post-war, “Boer and Briton” white supremacist governmental consensus (fig. 7). This building, too, was rendered in the redoubtable contours of the Edwardian Baroque, signaling the promise of reconciliation and stability evidenced in rapid economic development and enhanced techniques of racial segregation and labor management.

Figure 7: Union Buildings, Pretoria, South Africa (1910-13), by Herbert Baker.

Figure 7: Union Buildings, Pretoria, South Africa (1910-13), by Herbert Baker.

Source: Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities, London: Country Life, 1944.

13But the roots of these architectural articulations went deeper still. It is interesting to observe how, transposed to the Transvaala land in the grip of a gold rush, a new El Dorado—this species of neo-Baroque architecture rose in dialogue with the grasping priorities of an imperial metropolis, the ultimate beneficiary of its extracted wealth. There is an instructive, perhaps disturbing, historical parallel here with the Spanish and Portuguese empires, their own violent, extractive colonial cultures, and the rise of the Baroque arts in the Iberian world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in architecture.

  • 24 For instance, see Robert C. Smith Jr., “The Colonial Architecture of Minas Gerais in Brazil,” The A (...)

14Due to the expense incurred in its production, Baroque was understood as an index to wealth, which flowed via the gold, silver, and diamond mines of the ‘new world’ Americas.24 Here one could point to the former Casa de Câmara e Cadeia (begun 1785) and Casa dos Contos (1782-1784), both in Ouro Preto, Brazil, which were the seat of the governor-general and regional tax collector respectively. Johannesburg, with the opulence projected by its numerous Edwardian Baroque buildings, may be seen as part of the baroque’s continuum with colonial practices of extraction and exploitation (fig. 8). In Johannesburg alone there was the Rand Club (1902-1904) and the Stock Exchange (1902-1904). The Town Hall was soon to be erected (1910-1915). All of them were variants of the Edwardian Baroque, all buildings heavily connected to the racialized extractive economy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa, and all within a hundred-meter radius of one another.

Figure 8: Bankers’ Baroque: Three examples of Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. Branch buildings: (top) Salisbury, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe); (middle) Kimberley, South Africa; (bottom) Bulawayo, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). These buildings are all roughly contemporary with one another and with that in Johannesburg.

Figure 8: Bankers’ Baroque: Three examples of Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. Branch buildings: (top) Salisbury, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe); (middle) Kimberley, South Africa; (bottom) Bulawayo, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). These buildings are all roughly contemporary with one another and with that in Johannesburg.

Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.

  • 25 For instance, Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Plac (...)
  • 26 For instance: “The oak is man, in firmness drest. / With strength of fondness in his breast. …”. Se (...)

15Be this as it may, it was the puffed-up sense of Anglo-Britishness embodied by the bank’s architecture that was noticed at the time. In its report on the new building, The Star newspaper waxed lyrical about the building’s masculine attributes, using the words “strength,” “massive,” “solid,” and “permanence” no fewer than thirteen times. In this regard, a great deal was made of the extensive use of English oak on the interior. This “oaken effect,” as the newspaper labeled it, was believed to be the first time solid English oak had been used only and wholly throughout an entire building in South Africa. Produced by Waring & Gillow of London, it took the form of panelling, screens, and all furniture and fittings, including the building’s principal staircase. To the British and immigrant colonial frame of mind, English oak—both the tree itself, and the timber that came from it—had near mythical powers of cultural association.25 Its masculine ruggedness had been extolled in poetry, while it was “hearts of oak” that had won empires.26 The most public space—the 15,000-sq.-ft. (about 1400 m2) banking hall, considered one of if not the largest in the world at the time—was entirely decked out in this material (fig. 9). Tall and open, this space gave an overwhelming impression of ampleness. It was divided into three principal areas: a public area on the sides facing the street; an area extending towards the back, for the desks of the dozens of clerks and tellers the bank employed for its day-to-day business; and a separate oak-panel partitioned area on the far side for management staff, hidden from public view. Above this last space was a mezzanine area containing the bank’s correspondence department. The whole was interspersed with prominent, solid steel Ionic columns supporting the immense superstructure above. But the most conspicuous feature was the 152-ft (46-meter) oak counter. Graciously curved in line with the perimeter of the space, this fixture securely separated the bank’s customers from its tellers via a solid and continuous unlacquered bronze grate. This latter feature was one that worked to reinforce the overarching defensive posture of the bank’s architecture. Here, everyday customers—from miners, to local business people, to those simply wishing to deposit money—interacted with the bank’s bureaucratic machinery, but always at a managed distance, literally at arm’s length.

Figure 9: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-1907), South Africa: main banking hall, from different angles (c.1908).

Figure 9: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-1907), South Africa: main banking hall, from different angles (c.1908).

Source: [left] Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 177; [right] The Star, 5 Nov. 1908.

16There was a tension here (a contradiction, even) between the building’s tubthumping projection of business confidence, invested in the nomenclature used to describe it, and a certain wariness concerning the social and environmental conditions prevalent on the Rand. In this sense, the building may be understood as an outward-facing and exuberant signal of market position and strength, yet one that struck a certain inward and defensive pose. It was this Janus-faced countenance, it may be argued, that lay at the foundation of the institution’s psychology as an instrument of financial management—a dynamic and productive friction between fear and trust, characteristic of the Edwardian Baroque movement as a whole.

  • 27 For instance, see Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance: South Africa and the Internati (...)
  • 28 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 177. See also, Donald Den (...)
  • 29 For instance, see An Act to Extend the Powers of the Standard Bank of British South Africa (Limited (...)

17Beyond its architecture, however, the bank’s impressive performance drew the attention of business leaders and politicians. Indeed, its accomplishments were all the more remarkable considering that the Transvaal became the world’s single largest producer of gold during the period, responsible for approximately one-third of global output by 1908, which itself represented nearly two-thirds of total South African exports by value.27 Gold bullion was important as a commodity, acting effectively as raw currency that underpinned the gold standard international monetary system. Being pegged to the gold standard, and with its source of gold protected by the Royal Navy, Sterling’s reputation as a safe-haven currency of choice was secured.28 As a key player in this system, the Standard Bank was therefore a powerful and influential institution, with strong connections to both the British imperial and Cape governments.29

Networks of invisible income

  • 30 Edelstein, Overseas Investment, p. 9-44.
  • 31 See statistical tables in Matthew Simon, “The Enterprise and Industrial Composition of New British (...)
  • 32 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 161-164.
  • 33 W. Arthur Lewis, Economic Survey 1919-1939, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1949, p. 77; P. J. Cain(...)
  • 34 Peter J. Cain and Antony Gerald Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 173. This is a (...)

18At stake was the stability of the international banking system, which Britain, and the City of London in particular, largely controlled. Orchestrating this system, of which the gold standard was the ultimate backstop, generated huge visible and “invisible” income streams—revenue that the British economy had increasingly become reliant upon.30 It is worth considering here for a moment what this system was and how the Standard Bank was plugged into it. As one of a limited number of imperial banks, the Standard was something of a keystone in the structure that comprised this globalized financial edifice. So-called invisible income was largely generated through banking and insurance activity, especially investment in areas such as infrastructure, which included railways and port facilities, as well as government stocks.31 The figures are revealing. Between the mid-1850s and 1870, Britain’s overseas investments rose from around £200 million to some £700 million. By 1900 they had risen by a further £1.3 billion, to over £2 billion; and by 1913 they had topped between £3.5 billion and £4 billion.32 This represents a twenty-fold increase over a sixty- to seventy-year period. As Arthur Lewis has observed, these commercial services “developed so considerably that a large surplus was still left to finance a growing export of capital,” which in turn provided Britain with a continual income from interest and dividends.33 By 1913, these assets were reportedly producing revenues in excess of £200 million annually.34

  • 35 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 182-184. The work they re (...)
  • 36 See A.S.J. Baster, The Imperial Banks, London: P. S. King & Sons, 1929.
  • 37 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 172-173.

19Indeed, working from the analysis of Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback, the economic historians Peter Cain and Andrew Hopkins note that there was a distinct preference among elites in Britain (i.e., gentleman capitalists) for foreign over domestic investment, with “peers and gents” preferring empire stocks over both foreign and domestic by some margin.35 The role of the imperial banks in channelling investment and securing overseas income was important in this. As noted, these were headquartered in the City of London, and given Royal Charter privileges (including limited liability) in operating throughout the empire.36 By raising capital in Britain and deposits locally, these banks were able to extend lines of credit, spreading British trade, finance, and thus influence around the world. The investment streams were so significant that Britain was effectively able to integrate large parts of the global economy under British leadership.37

  • 38 H. J. Habakkuk, “Free Trade and Commercial Expansion, 1853-1870,” in John Holland Rose, Arthur Perc (...)
  • 39 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 238-240.
  • 40 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 48. The actual figure he gives is 988.
  • 41 A.S.J. Baster, The Imperial Banks, op. cit. (note 36).

20Of the total of foreign investments made by the gentlemanly capitalist class, an increasingly sizable proportion was in imperial stocks and bonds.38 Colonies of settlement, like South Africa, were particularly favored for the reliability and long-term security they offered by way of returns.39 As these places came up against capital and labor shortages in their relentless pursuit of development, they became more reliant on large capital injections from Britain, as well as direct government intervention on the ground. According to Donald Denoon, so important had the London capital market become by 1900 that there were nearly one thousand British, colonial, and foreign banks with offices or agencies in the city for the purposes of conducting international transactions.40 Colonies such as Canada and Australia had a number of local banks which could raise capital for agricultural and industrial purposes, but the presence and role of chartered, Anglo-colonial banks headquartered in London became ever more important in the second half of the nineteenth century for channelling and administering funds from Britain for large-scale capital works projects.41 As the Standard’s Johannesburg headquarters confirms, the presence of these ‘imperial banks’ was visible in the form of conspicuous branch buildings in major urban centres throughout the empire.

  • 42 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 229-275.
  • 43 H. J. Habakkuk, “Free Trade and Commercial Expansion,” op. cit. (note 38), p. 798-799. See also And (...)
  • 44 Tinashe Nyamunda and Admire Mseba, “Money in South-Central Africa, 1890-1931: Africans, Imperial St (...)

21Ironically, the more these polities gained their autonomy as self-governing communities within a Greater British global domain, the more reliant (and therefore beholden) they became on British financial services.42 In supplying much of the capital necessary for continued development, Britain also supplied a great deal of the technical expertise and management direction. This in itself points to the degree of economic and political continuity that existed between Britain and the colonies of white settlement which did not exist between it and other sovereign states.43 Indeed, the same logic applied at the expanding frontiers of empire. As Tinashe Nyamunda and Admire Mseba have argued in relation to Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi under British rule in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legislation designed to peg local economies to Sterling not only facilitated ease of trade but also economic integration, necessitating ever greater degrees of colonial regulation and control.44 With political power magnified at every stage of the process, escaping this monetary straitjacket would prove all but impossible.

  • 45 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 4.
  • 46 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970, Cambridg (...)
  • 47 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1).

22The huge leaps forward in communications technology that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century, including the global extension of rail networks, steam shipping, and submarine telegraph cabling, also played a large part in stimulating this surge in economic activity.45 The process, fuelled by immigration, was made easier, faster, and cheaper as the nineteenth century wore on. These phenomena were of course interrelated. The pressing need for up-to-date information that helped provide commercial advantage and mitigate risk ensured that Britain remained the world leader in communications technology.46 The new degrees of connectivity that resulted had consequences for commercial architecture in the sense that ever-thickening networks of communication enabled extended market scale and penetration, necessitating local branch construction in order to solicit and manage business interests in an increasingly competitive field. Again, in such a context, presence, reputation, and brand legibility were crucial. This integrated British world transformed architectural design into a readily exportable commodity, enabling for much greater degrees of stylistic consistency and reproducibility. Both architects and architectural ideas could travel farther and faster than ever before. In such an environment, the Edwardian Baroque flourished as a potent symbol of financial credibility and persuasion.47

Troubling times: Questions of labor and race

  • 48 For instance, see English translation of leading article in Die Afrikaanse Patriot, 14 March 1882. (...)
  • 49 J. R. K. Barker, ‘The Advent of the Imperial Banks,” op. cit. (note 13), p. 204-205.

23However, both the Standard Bank’s and the imperial financial system’s success in South Africa occurred against a backdrop of intense cultural and political strain between the Afrikaans and British colonial communities, as well as increasing statutory segregation of these communities from indigenous black African and other non-white immigrant inhabitants. Although the Afrikaners were themselves colonials, they largely saw the British as “Johnny-come-lately” invaders, who were keen on pushing them around. These tensions led to the first and, much more devastating, second Anglo-Boer wars (1880-1 and 1899-1902), before the eventual “unification” of South Africa in 1910 as a self-governing Dominion of the British empire. Thus, some in the Afrikaans community were naturally suspicious of the imperial banks, viewing them (rightly, it so happens) as covert instruments of imperialism.48 Indeed, as J. R. K. Barker went so far as to suggest, the advent of banks in South Africa such as the Standard, with the powerful political and financial pressures they exerted, were responsible for the ratcheting of tensions between the two communities, leading directly to the formation of the Afrikander Bond political party in 1881. This was founded to counter British imperialism and to work towards federating South Africa’s provinces into an independent, post-colonial republic.49

  • 50 Jonathan Massey, “Risk Design,” Grey Room, no. 54, Winter 2014, p. 6-33. URL: https://www.greyroom. (...)
  • 51 On this notion of semiotics and corporate architecture, see Kim Dovey, “Corporate Towers and Symbol (...)

24Tensions were further exacerbated by the British imperial authority’s passing of legislation that allowed mining companies, backed by imperial finance, to import cheap foreign labor onto the Rand. This not only increased the precarity of the largely unskilled Afrikaans labor force, but also threatened the tenets of colonial white supremacy in South Africa. Therefore, risks other than those concerning straightforward business competition remained for the Standard Bank, suggesting that the situation was perhaps not as stable as the bank wished to portray, particularly in the immediate post-Boer War period. This precarity fed into what Jonathan Massey has described in another context as the bank’s “risk imaginary.” In this sense, the Rand presented a specific set of problems, tempering how much and in what capacity global capital was prepared to invest. Here architecture played an important role in managing and thus re-imagining the Standard Bank’s risk profile through specific design strategies, in the process “reshaping” risk perception in order to boost business confidence.50 We have already seen, for instance, how this strategy had benefitted the building and its associated business in the way it was reported in the press. This speaks to the semiotics of the built environment, and how architecture was deployed deliberately as a form of capitalist “mediation.”51 It was adjustments to the region’s perceived risk profile such as this that allowed the transformation of Johannesburg into a post-war British commercial and administrative power base demonstrating how the imperial authorities relied on institutions like the Standard in advancing an ambitious developmental program. In return, the Standard enjoyed the stability and relative predictability supplied by the rule of law and regulatory regimes put in place and enforced by the state.

  • 52 Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance,” op. cit. (note 27).
  • 53 Mae N. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand: The Chinese Question in South Africa and the Apogee of White Set (...)

25Some of these laws, however, had the unintended consequence of destabilizing the situation instead, thus heightening the region’s risk profile. This was the case with the increasingly vexed mining labor laws, which, in deference to the demands of the major mining companies, sought to regulate contract labor and reduce wage expenditure. The friction around this problem reveals to some extent the gold standard system’s reliance on the exercise of imperial power in securing reserves.52 The mining companies’ lobbying of government over employment law arose in the context of the short-term labor crisis following the Second Anglo-Boer War, their inability to organize a cheap and reliable indigenous black African workforce, and the increase in and militancy of trade unionism. The latter of these was the natural outcome of the expansion of the mining industry and its demand for an ever-greater supply of skilled miners, which sucked in seasoned union activists from places such as Britain and Australia. The companies claimed that these factors combined threatened the stability of the entire industry and thus the fiscal foundations of the state itself. In response, the British government allowed the mining companies to import “coolie” laborers directly from China. Having worked gold mines in other colonial contexts since the mid-nineteenth century, in places such as California, Australia, and Canada, Chinese laborers had established a reputation for low-cost reliability. Between 1904 and 1907, roughly the period during which the new Standard Bank headquarters was designed and built, more than 60,000 Chinese came to work the Witwatersrand gold mines (fig. 10). Although described as an “experiment” in getting the mines running properly again, the Randlords privately hoped that cheap Chinese labor would become a permanent feature of the Witwatersrand gold mining scene, with an expectation of importing 100,000 laborers per annum. As Mae Ngai has observed, this scenario promised levels of control and coercion in the labor market that had yet been unachievable on the Rand.53

  • 54 Karen Harris, “The 1907 strike: A watershed in South African white miner trade unionism,” African H (...)

26Indeed, the mining companies had already tried to undermine the increasingly unionized white workforce by drawing on greater numbers of cheaper black African workers. But this tactic failed, as indigenous laborers were prone to walk off the job owing to poor conditions and ill treatment. Although indigenous laborers were eventually forced to enter contracts with mining companies, including the necessity for carrying identity passes, few means existed in law to make such laborers return to work, or indeed to prevent them from seeking better conditions elsewhere. The situation was particularly dire following the war, when indigenous laborers largely refused to accept terms offered by the mining companies. To compensate, the companies began cynically blurring what were otherwise strict racial divisions within the mining workforce, encouraging black African miners to acquire greater skills-based roles with the purpose of challenging white miners’ demands for privileged status and higher pay.54

Figure 10: Some of the thousands of Chinese coolie labourers assembled on the Witwatersrand at their residential compound.

Figure 10: Some of the thousands of Chinese coolie labourers assembled on the Witwatersrand at their residential compound.

Source: Johannesburg (South Africa), Transnet Heritage Library, ZA 0375-LS-LS_05_002.

  • 55 Gary Kynoch, “Controlling the Coolies: Chinese Mineworkers and the Struggle for Labor in South Afri (...)
  • 56 For the white supremacism of the early, empire-wide trade union movement, see Jonathan Hyslop, “The (...)

27Given these strained relations, much greater restrictions were imposed on in-coming Chinese laborers from the start. These laborers were effectively a captive workforce, indentured through three-year contracts with their employers, who brought them directly from China at corporate expense. They were essentially dehumanized as an indistinguishable mass, each referred to by number rather than by name, and prohibited from taking other forms of paid employment, or even ranging beyond the confines of the Johannesburg mining district. By 1905, thirty-five mines were making use of Chinese laborers. Under the terms of the Labour Importation Ordinance (1904), breach of contract was punishable by imprisonment, beatings (often administered by Chinese “police”), and/or the forcible return to work until contracts were fulfilled. This made the Chinese particularly vulnerable to exploitation, where a strategy of maximum extraction prevailed on the part of mining companies. Although these laborers resisted some of the most draconian demands of the companies, they were nevertheless prepared to work ten hours per day, six days a week, in the most difficult and dangerous of jobs, over one thousand feet below ground.55 Thus, where the companies’ brutal and “efficient” labor regime had failed in organizing cheap African labor, imported Chinese workers were seen as the solution. These tactics on the part of the mining companies not only further agitated industrial relations by deliberately undercutting the reward demands of the white workforce, but also cynically divided miners in the knowledge that the white supremacist ideologies of the unions prevented cooperation in what was now a competitive, tri-partite racialized labor environment.56

  • 57 Alan Jeeves, “The control of migratory labour on the South African gold mines in the era of Kruger (...)
  • 58 For insights on how this arrangement facilitated and entrenched what some have called “racialized c (...)

28These circumstances gave the distinct perception that the mining companies, like the banks, were in cahoots with the Transvaal imperial government. The greed and profiteering of the mining companies was seen by many in the white settler community, particularly among poorer Afrikaners, as a betrayal of the post-war promise of white supremacy. Importing foreign “yellow” labor was understood as a flagrant provocation in what was already a fractious racialized environment. But the government appreciated the need for a productive and profitable mining industry. The prevailing belief was that mining, along with the railways, was fundamental to the financial and thus political stability of the state, and therefore could not be left to the vagaries of private enterprise without various forms of state intervention and support.57 For their part, the mining industry, through the powerful Chamber of Mines, which controlled the local press, sought to propagate the self-serving narrative that the health of the mining industry was what ensured the health of the state.58

  • 59 Mae N. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand,” op. cit. (note 53), p. 67.
  • 60 Ibid., p. 72.
  • 61 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1)., p. 83.

29Thus, the idea that the South African mining industry could be propped up and made profitable by the employment of cheap colored labor (in order to extract maximum dividends for corporate shareholders) served to increase speculative foreign investment. This placed increased power in the hands of local and imperial financial institutions, which were now seen as the “very real power” in the colony, with little or no interest in the political or social aspirations of local communities.59 Again, in the words of Ngai: “the conflict between white laborism and capital was, at one level, over the distribution of resources and power within the context of the white settler state. At another level, racial nationalism expressed the view that racial entitlement unified national identity and purpose across class lines.”60 To what extent these vexed race relations fed into labor conditions in the actual construction of the Standard Bank in Johannesburg is not known. Presumably, black African laborers were involved in various capacities throughout the building’s stages of construction. What, if any, on-site friction this caused remains a mystery. It is known, for instance, that the supply of stone required for the facing of Durban Town Hall (1905-1910), a structure contemporary with the Standard Bank, was delayed owing to a rebellion on the part of the black laborers who worked the quarry.61 In any case, one might reasonably assume that in its very fabric, the Standard Bank embodied the mining race relations it exacerbated financially.

30The election of the Afrikaner Het Volk party to government in 1907 brought an end to the imported Chinese labor program, with the last Chinese leaving the province in 1910. Nevertheless, the symbiosis between government and industry that characterized the extraction-based developmental politics of the post-war Transvaal enabled a climate in which the specter of mass unemployment and social instability could be easily invoked as reasons to protect, regulate, and stimulate mining activity. The Standard Bank—as a monument to the ongoing success of the Witwatersrand mining industry—thus symbolized in some sense the divisive, exploitative, and near zero-sum profiteering tactics of the industry as a whole, being one of the primary financial sponsors of that industry. Again, its architecture signaled this through its projection of an anchored and thus stable structure, demonstrating a perceived commitment to managing both the Bank’s and the Rand’s environment of risk. Moreover, currency in the form of Sterling, being dependent on the South African gold mining industry via the international gold standard, represented to some degree a medium of exchange sublimated within the exploitative and racialized conditions of the colonial extractive economy.

The aesthetics of hegemonic masculinity

  • 62 Keith Breckenridge, “The allure of violence: Men, race and masculinity on the South African goldmin (...)

31Given this context, it is possible to offer further insights on the the Standard Bank building’s architecture. One reading would suggest the possibility of an associational link not only with the macho disposition of the mining industry itself, but also the divisive and exploitative employment practices of the mining companies the bank supported. This situates Johannesburg’s Standard Bank building within (rather than adjacent to or beside) the rough, tough, and often violent milieu of the Witwatersrand goldfields. As Keith Breckenridge has observed, these notoriously difficult and dangerous goldmines fostered a certain “ethic” of manhood that led to what R. W. Connell has termed cultures of “hegemonic masculinity.”62 Indeed, the barring of women and boys from working underground, enshrined in law by 1911, exacerbated the somewhat artificial homo-social environment of the mines. In this subterranean world, codes of manly conduct and controlled violence were formed and exercised. They were also understood and indulged in by both white colonial and black African miners, even if deployed in enforcing racial hierarchies. Breckenridge argues that from this arose an “aesthetics” of masculinity, power, and violence that maintained performative and thus symbolic value. The ideals and practices associated with masculinity in this “world,” including the coercive and punitive application of physical violence, defined the meaning of manhood for many (fig. 11).

Figure 11: Underground mining—a dangerous business: miners work the rockface (stope) in at New Primrose gold mine on the Rand.

Figure 11: Underground mining—a dangerous business: miners work the rockface (stope) in at New Primrose gold mine on the Rand.

Source: F. E. Pollard, c. 1900, source.

  • 63 Jonathan Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class,” op. cit. (note 56).
  • 64 Ibid., p. 418.

32Associated with this culture, and tied to its racialized structures, was the parallel phenomenon of what Jonathan Hyslop has called the ideology of “white labourism.”63 This was a fundamental characteristic of the empire-wide trade unionist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which fought for the protection and supremacy of not only the “home” but also immigrant white working population, wherever they might be. These “imperial working-class” sympathies were particularly strong in South Africa, where the employment conditions and job security of the white mining workforce were considered especially precarious. In this sense, as Hyslop notes, “whiteness was not so much imposed from above as demanded from below. The imperial working class did not ‘become white’: it made itself white.” (emphasis in the original).64 Therefore, the capitalist imperatives of the mining companies and the demands of the trade unions may have been at loggerheads, but the one thing they would no doubt have agreed upon was the ultimate necessity for white supremacy in South Africa. Thus, although there were specific skirmishes around working rights and conditions, which the mining companies often manipulated to their advantage, the imperial authorities in the Transvaal had established a colonial settler society that maintained a strict racial hierarchy, in the interests both of South African and wider British imperial political and financial security. Establishing and maintaining this politically delicate supremacy in the context of a thriving economy was one of the principal tasks of the post-war reconstruction government.

33These factors give the Standard Bank’s Johannesburg headquarters building an added complexion. In one sense, its vigorously articulated classicism, with associated masculine overtones, resonated with the hyper masculine environments from which it drew its principal revenue. Considering the somewhat frenzied and irregular “wild west” business conditions of the early twentieth-century Witwatersrand, the Edwardian Baroque styling of the building, with its heaving virility and fortress-like countenance, was, it may be suggested, an entirely appropriate architecture for a business at the heart of the Transvaal mining industry. In another sense, the building’s appeal to British identity and traditions may have sat uneasily with the Afrikaans political leadership (with some viewing imperial banks as operating solely in the interests of the imperial authorities), but it nevertheless signaled a wider imperial culture that was determined to uphold the white supremacist settlement concerning the “union” of the “two races” (Afrikaans and British) in post-war South Africa. The message the architecture of the bank sent, therefore, was clear: in the rough-and-tumble, near-cutthroat business conditions of the Rand, the Standard had succeeded, with its vigorous aesthetic signalling its ruthless corporate intent. It was an image that may not have been appreciated by all, but one that had to be respected.

Medium as message: Reputational management and the theatre of trust

  • 65 Liz McFall and Francis Dodsworth, “Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance in the L (...)
  • 66 Liz McFall and Francis Dodsworth, “Fabricating the Market,” p. 30-32.
  • 67 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge Univers (...)
  • 68 Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, “Corporate Identity,” op. cit. (note 65), p. 129-159; Mona Domos (...)

34This raises further questions about the bank’s capacity to communicate its purpose aesthetically. In an era where advertising techniques had developed fast in terms of sophistication, manipulation, and pervasiveness, architecture’s co-option as a conspicuous element of corporate endorsement was no coincidence.65 The process of “fabricating” market position often required substantial material resources. In this respect, a carefully orchestrated program for architectural embellishment became yet another form of promotional media, helping any given business establish a reputation for rectitude and prudence, as well as bestowing degrees of credibility and authority.66 This takes us back to the idea of risk management. It involves what Pierre Bourdieu has called “symbolic capital,” and may be applied readily in this case.67 By the late nineteenth century, the strategic placement of buildings was a key weapon in fiercely competitive commercial environments, such as those encouraged by politically and economically liberal states.68

  • 69 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, Chic (...)
  • 70 The Star, 5 Nov. 1908, p. 6.
  • 71 James A. Henry, The Standard Bank’s Early Days, op. cit. (note 15), p. 8-9.

35For the Standard, this translated into a visual and spatial language concerned with scale, prestige, permanence, and solidity. Moreover, the message it sent concerning its “imperial” status, as well as English (i.e., London) connections, was obviously an important component in the way it wished to position itself vis-à-vis the colonial context and its competitors. Here the perceived modernity of the building and its materiality mattered. For instance, the fact that that the building had the latest in solid bronze electric light fittings supplied by Reunert & Lenz of Johannesburg conflated ideas of robustness with legibility. In this sense, the notion of seeing was associated with reliability and purpose. The enhanced level of legibility that electric lighting provided was symptomatic of what Chris Otter describes as the need for improved “states of productive attention” characteristic of efficiency drives in late Victorian and Edwardian culture.69 The fact that the building also had up-to-date safe technology supplied by Chubb & Co. of London, with strongroom doors by Chatwood & Co. of Manchester, as well as elevator technology by Waygood & Co. (London), was not only sound business practice but likewise designed to inspire confidence. As The Star newspaper proclaimed: “the strong room [59ft. x 32ft.] has a ceiling 2ft. 4in. thick, and of such strength to withstand the collapse of the whole superstructure. … The patrol passage around the strong room and the impression of strength which this part of the building gives at a glance are things to be noted” (fig. 12).70 Indeed, the basement of the building, as mentioned, contained a specially designed in-house assay and smelting operation, adding an industrial dimension to the bank’s luster as a type of machine for the efficient and secure accumulation, assessment, and processing of bullion, with its ultimate conversion into cash.71 Again, the incorporation of specific technologies into the structure, such as proprietary safe and elevator equipment and light fittings, promoted notions of security, precision, and thus predictable economic growth, “building” an image of resilience in the face of uncertainty.

Figure 12: This is the only surviving copy of the plan to the basement of the Standard Bank headquarters building in Johannesburg. The original plan and drawings for the building were destroyed c. 2018. The main strongroom is located in the middle of the plan, with the “patrol passage” around it highlighted in red (colour added).

Figure 12: This is the only surviving copy of the plan to the basement of the Standard Bank headquarters building in Johannesburg. The original plan and drawings for the building were destroyed c. 2018. The main strongroom is located in the middle of the plan, with the “patrol passage” around it highlighted in red (colour added).

Source: Stucke Bannister Archive [now destroyed]. Reproduced in J. J. Bruwer, Heritage Assessment Surveying Form: (Third) Standard Bank Chambers, Johannesburg, 2004. URL: https://www.heritageregister.org.za/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Standard%20Bank%20Chambers%20-%202002%20Survey%20-%20Bruwer.pdf. Accessed 20 December 2024.

  • 72 Alexandra Quantrill, “The Value of Enclosure and the Business of Banking,” Grey Room, no. 71, 2018, (...)

36With this in mind, it may be observed that the Standard Bank building in Johannesburg stood as a kind of “decorated vault.” It was both similar to and different from latter rhetorical gestures in banking architecture, perhaps best represented by Foster Associates design for the HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong in the 1980s. While Alexandra Quantrill effectively points to the inherent contradictions between notions of “flexibility” and transparency in that building’s design with those concerning abstraction and obscurity in the bank’s actual operation, in the Standard’s case its rhetorical and operational facets were more closely aligned.72 Although it is not as simple as “what you see is what you get,” the building nonetheless trades off its apparent image of protection, at least partly communicated through the perceived thickness and insuperable opacity of its stone walls. Indeed, going beyond traditional ideas of security, it thus presents itself, through its sheer heft and muscular countenance, as a kind of thuggish combatant, employing an aesthetic that seemed calculated both to magnify and inspire confidence in its ruthless business tactics, connecting it once more to the prevalent masculine ideologies of the early twentieth-century Rand.

  • 73 Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank, op. cit. (note 7), p. 176-177.
  • 74 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 177. See also Donald Deno (...)

37These cues were extended to the visible components of the processing and transportation of gold bullion. While assaying procedures remained underground, out of sight, the transportation of bullion from the premises to the train station, and then on to London via port facilities in Cape Town, was conducted in the open and potentially vulnerable. Indeed, by the time the new building was opened and operational in 1908, the security situation on the Rand had deteriorated significantly. Although the famous horse-drawn bullion wagon was still used, security measures were beefed-up substantially. Now the bullion was loaded, under armed guard, into a purpose-built iron strongbox formed as part of the cart (fig. 13). While the gold was en route, the armed detail followed close behind.73 In this way, the bank disgorged its precious contents on a weekly basis into what was effectively a miniature and portable version of its own strongroom technology, enhancing its reputation for security. Considering these functional, aesthetic, and performative dimensions of the Standard’s Johannesburg operation, linked as they were in a chain of spatial operations between the mine shaft and the Bank of England, with the technologies of security deployed and on display throughout, gives new meaning to one-time prime minister Lord Rosebery’s remark that Britain was “the strong box and the safe of Europe.”74

Figure 13: Standard Bank operatives unloading gold bullion at the Johannesburg railway station(c. 1896).

Figure 13: Standard Bank operatives unloading gold bullion at the Johannesburg railway station(c. 1896).

Source: Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 176.

  • 75 Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800, Cambridge: C (...)
  • 76 Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “The Larkin’s Technologies of Trust,” Journal of the Society of Architectur (...)

38The bank’s efforts to project an image of itself in this way as a type of security apparatus reminds us of Patrick Joyce’s notion of the “performative” dimensions of institutional architecture. In this sense, the Standard was staging something of a “theater” of trust around its reputation, through what Joyce, in another context, refers to as a “material and human performance of predictability, reliability and dependability.”75 Perceptions of the bank as a piece of finance technology, or “machine,” in this regard also point to Theodore Porter’s thesis concerning the epistemic nature of quantitative methods in modern bureaucracy. The architectural implications of this have recently been articulated by Zeynep Çelik Alexander in relation to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, in Buffalo (1903-1906), whereby spatial sequencing required discrete and interchangeable divisions in order to manage clerical labor efficiently.76 These ideas extended to the very notion of multinational banking, the wider capitalist system in which it operated, and thereby the imperial state itself. This included perceived trust on the part of actual and potential users of the bank (both big and small, elite and plebeian), and how the building itself was positioned in the Johannesburg cityscape as a landmark so as to enhance its institutional status. The efficacy of this may be measured, again, against the high levels of distrust that surrounded the bank and its activities by sections of the Afrikaans community. In this sense, risk and trust were different sides of the same reputational coin.

  • 77 Rand Daily Mail, 7 Nov. 1908, p. 5.

39In the case of the Standard, this success was often folded into a narrative of persistent growth against the odds, based in shrewd business acumen. Here, too, architecture was marshalled as a form of visual shorthand. In its report on the opening of the new building, the Rand Daily Mail showed not a series of impressive photographs, as The Star had done, but rather a series of four small sketches illustrating the Standard Bank’s evolution as a quotient of ever larger and better-appointed premises (fig. 14).77 This literally spelled out the connection between architecture and business success, reinforcing notions of trust and integrity in the bank as a solid financial institution. It contributed to what might be described as the business’s mythological “aura” as not only a stalwart of the Rand, but also an enterprise central to the rise of Johannesburg itself.

Figure 14: “The Growth of Johannesburg” as seen through the development of its principal bank.

Figure 14: “The Growth of Johannesburg” as seen through the development of its principal bank.

Source: Rand Daily Mail, November 1908.

Conclusion: Securitizing capital

  • 78 T. R. H. Davenport, “The South African Rebellion, 1914,” English Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 30 (...)
  • 79 Susan Parnell, “Sanitation, segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act: African exclusion from J (...)
  • 80 Jeremy Kirkler, “The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre,” The Historical Journal, v (...)
  • 81 Deryck Schreuder, “Colonial Nationalism and ‘tribal nationalism’: Making the White South African St (...)

40But a more troubling reality lurked beneath appearances, suggesting that the foundations upon which this edifice rested were not as solid as its architecture purported. As discussed above, in apparent contradiction to its self-fashioned image of trust, stability, and success, the Standard Bank headquarters building stood in the face of widespread disaffection for the heavy handedness of British-dominated rule in Johannesburg, including attempts to quash unionized labor. These tensions only escalated during the second decade of the twentieth century. The nearby town hall, for instance, built in a similar style to the bank, and pockmarked with bullet holes, bore witness to the miners’ revolt of July 1913. Several miners were killed in the ensuing fracas. Hard on the heels of this came the fallout from the Maritz Rebellion, which was put down little more than a year later, in October 1914. Grievances against the Union government on the part of hard-line Afrikaner nationalists—mostly Bittereinders who had never really accepted the outcome of the war—festered, leading to full-scale revolt.78 Besides this, there was the hardening of racial segregation laws. These laws ominously foreshadowed the notorious Group Areas Act of the Apartheid era, and were devised by Johannesburg Town Council.79 If these events were not enough, the African mineworkers’ strike of 1920, followed by the so-called Rand Revolt among white miners of 1922, demonstrated how badly relations had deteriorated between the mining companies, the government, and the Witwatersrand labor force. This revolt resulted in the murder of some forty black African miners. Again, the mining companies’ racial manipulation of labor fomented these tensions (i.e., altering the “job color bar”), but a falling gold price also put considerable pressure on the need to cut costs, thus leading to a full-frontal assault on unionized white labor that precipitated the revolt.80 These events belied the rather rose-tinted, “victor’s” idea of union being the happy convergence of “Boer and Briton,” as G. M. Theal imagined it. Similarly, the revolts did not tally much with notions of a newborn “colonial nationalism,” a bond apparently thickened by a common interest in white supremacy.81

  • 82 Andries Bezuidenhout and Sakhela Buhlungu, “From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and t (...)
  • 83 For this kind of architecture and its effects, see Robert K. Home, “From barrack compounds to the s (...)
  • 84 Lindsay Weiss, “Exceptional Space: Concentration Camps and Labor Compounds in Late Nineteenth-Centu (...)

41Moreover, the securitized logic behind the bank’s image found its miserable corollary in the barrack compounds established for housing migrant labor on the Rand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both the indigenous African and Chinese laborers were housed in these infamous and poorly constructed settlements. Their purpose was to corral non-white laborers in order to monitor, control, and even humiliate them through punitive regimes of conditioning.82 Being fenced or walled, with controlled entry and exit points, these compounds were in effect open prisons for those employed by the mining companies (fig. 15). They operated in tandem with the pass system mentioned above, and through their mechanisms of surveillance concerning the pilfering of corporate property, including gold, presumed the criminality of their inmates.83 On the face of it, these two building types—the bank and the mining compound—could hardly have been more different. They were, however, governed by the same unrelenting capitalist logic. Although the Standard Bank did not own or control these compounds, both were excrescences of the same system. They merely occupied different ends of its spatial strategy. With government collusion and intervention, this system was prioritized, facilitated, and “legalized,” producing a regulatory framework in which the security of commodity flow trumped virtually all other considerations, including (and especially) civil and labor rights.84

Figure 15: Early “native” labourers’ compound, Witwatersrand (c.1900).

Figure 15: Early “native” labourers’ compound, Witwatersrand (c.1900).

Source: Figure 8 in Christo Vosloo, “Extreme apartheid: the South African system of migrant labour and its hostels,” Image & Text, no. 34, 2020. DOI: 10.17159/2617-3255/2020/n34a1.

  • 85 Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance,” op. cit. (note 27), p. 537.

42In conclusion, we may observe that the Standard Bank stood amidst all of this as a key agent in the capitalist development of colonial South Africa. On the one hand, its forthright, muscular architecture signaled success and a certain ebullience on the part of the bank in its business dealings on the Rand, tied as it was into the demands of the wider imperial financial system. On the other hand, the context in which this institution rose to dominance was highly vexed, increasingly unstable, and therefore at considerable risk of disruption, even collapse. Above all, the bank was an important facility for assaying gold and transferring bullion, thus playing a significant role in underpinning the gold standard international monetary system.85 It was obviously in the interests of the Transvaal government, the mining companies, and the banking sector to facilitate and support goldmining on the Rand, but it clearly came at a high cost not only to certain segments of Transvaal society, but also to the apparent cohesion of white supremacy in post-war South Africa. These circumstances problematize the idea of “currency” in the transactional space of the imperial economy. In this case, the perceived stability and “value” of Sterling may be seen to have rested, to some extent, on a commodity the extraction and processing of which was enveloped in cultures of racism and violence, from the threatening and dangerous environs of the mines themselves, to the cynical and racialized manipulation of workplace relations by mining companies, to the brutal treatment and exploitation of imported labor. This is not to mention the colonial pre-conditions for this operation, including the dispossession of land and resources from its indigenous inhabitants. In this scenario, the Standard Bank’s Johannesburg headquarters building was a “transactional” space par excellence.

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Notes

1 See Chapter 7 in G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885-1920, London: Paul Mellon Centre; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022, p. 203-251.

2 Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850-1914, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982.

3 G. A. Leyds, A History of Johannesburg: The Early Years, Beperk: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1964, p. 264-274.

4 Building News, 13 Nov. 1903, p. 676.

5 Gerhard-Mark van der Waal, From Mining Camp to Metropolis: The Buildings of Johannesburg 1886-1940, Melville: Chris van Rensburg Publications, 1987, p. 103.

6 Clive M. Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture & Society 1880s-1960s, Cape Town: David Philip, 1993, p. 40-53, 197-199.

7 J. A. Henry, First Hundred Years of the Standard Bank, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 90-103; Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town: W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 169-177.

8 Geoffrey Jones, British Multinational Banking 1830-1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

9 Ibid., p. 27. This number had reached 1,286 by 1913. See Geoffrey Jones, “Competitive advantages in British multinational banking since 1890,” in Geoffroy Jones (ed.), Banks as Multinationals, London: Routledge, 2012 [1990] (Routledge library editions. Banking & finance), p. 31. See also Richard Dennis, “Spaces of empire in Victorian and Edwardian London”, in G. A. Bremner and Daniel Maudlin (eds), Inner Empire: Architecture and Imperialism in Britain, 1550-1950, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024, p. 218-247.

10 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914, London; New York, NY: Longmans, 1993, p. 172-173.

11 George Thomas Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: R. Maclehose, 1914, p. 33.

12 J. A. Henry, First Hundred Years, op.cit. (note 7), p. 6-7.

13 George Thomas Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, op. cit. (note 11), p. 72-79. See also J. R. K. Barker, “The Advent of the Imperial Banks in South Africa: Their Financial, Social, and Political Influence,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, vol. 4, no. 6, 1907, p. 194-200.

14 Eric A. Walker, A History of South Africa, London: Longmans, 1928, p. 353. See also J. A. Henry, First Hundred Years, op. cit. (note 7), p. 10. The effects of this are stated in Stuart Jones, “The Apogee of the Imperial Banks in South Africa: Standard and Barclays, 1919-1939,” English Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 409, 1988, p. 892. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/570261. Accessed 18 December 2024.

15 Désirée Picton-Seymour, Historic Buildings in South Africa, Cape Town, Struikof Publishers, 1989, p. 152. For the bank’s various premises up to 1900, see James A. Henry, The Standard Bank’s Early Days in Johannesburg 1886-1900, Johannesburg, 1956; London (United Kingdom) Standard Bank Archive, London Metropolitan Archives: CLC/B/207/ST11/01/01/003.

16 The Star, 5 Nov. 1908, p. 6. See also Gerhard-Mark van der Waal, From Mining Camp to Metropolis, op. cit. (note 5), p. 128; Désirée Picton-Seymour, Historic Buildings, op. cit. (note 15), p. 152. Stucke & Bannister were formed in 1901 and mainly designed large-scale institutional buildings in South Africa, especially for banks and insurance companies.

17 The original architectural drawings were destroyed, along with much of the early Stucke & Bannister archive, in c.2018. These, along with the specification, would have revealed material sources.

18 J. J. Bruwer, Johannesburg Municipality Heritage Survey Report (Cat. No. BC-3), “(Third) Standard Bank Chambers” (2002).

19 For the idea that bank buildings signify financial stability, especially in the British tradition, see Daniel M. Abramson, Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2005.

20 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1).

21 John Brydon quoted in ibid., p. 18.

22 David B. Sadighian, “The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento in Belle Époque Brazil,” Architectural Histories, vol. 11, no. 1, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8598

.

23 For instance, see G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1), p. 79-121.

24 For instance, see Robert C. Smith Jr., “The Colonial Architecture of Minas Gerais in Brazil,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 2, 1939, p. 110-159. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.1939.11408729; Angela Delaforce, Art and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Portugal, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002. There is also a connection here between the evolution of the Baroque arts and ‘new world’ exoticism. For instance, see “Exotic Pleasures: Geography, Material Arts, and the ‘Agreeable’ World,” in Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe's Early Modern World, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 (Material Texts), p. 227-323. For the power of the “baroque” as a mediating force in colonial contexts, see “Mediations on the Baroque,” in Bolívar Echeverria, Modernity and Whiteness, Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019 (Critical South), p. 128-149.

25 For instance, Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place, Abingdon: Routledge, 2020 [2002] p. 35; Archie Miles, The British Oak, London: Constable & Robinson, 2013.

26 For instance: “The oak is man, in firmness drest. / With strength of fondness in his breast. …”. See Juliet Kinchin, “Interiors: nineteenth-century essays on the “masculine” and the “feminine” room,” in Pat Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object, Manchester; New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 15.

27 For instance, see Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance: South Africa and the International Gold Standard 1890-1914,” Journal of African History, vol. 23, 1982, p. 529. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/182040. Accessed 18 December 2024; Peter Richardson and Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “The Development of the South African Gold Mining Industry, 1895-1918,” Economic History Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 1984, p. 320-321.

28 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 177. See also, Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 69. The Bank of England and its gold reserves did not necessarily rely on gold from the Transvaal, but the fact that it could “tap” the weekly shipments of this gold coming from the Cape, through London, gave Sterling a rock-solid reputation. See Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance,” op. cit. (note 27), p. 536.

29 For instance, see An Act to Extend the Powers of the Standard Bank of British South Africa (Limited), and for Other Purposes Relating Thereto (44th-45th Victoriæ-Session 1881), London (United Kingdom), Standard Bank Archive, London Metropolitan Archives: CLC/B/207/ST11/02/003/002.

30 Edelstein, Overseas Investment, p. 9-44.

31 See statistical tables in Matthew Simon, “The Enterprise and Industrial Composition of New British Portfolio Foreign Investment, 1865-1914,” Journal of Development Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 1967, p. 280-292.

32 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 161-164.

33 W. Arthur Lewis, Economic Survey 1919-1939, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1949, p. 77; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 170, 197.

34 Peter J. Cain and Antony Gerald Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 173. This is a conservative estimate. See, P. J. Cain, “Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context,” in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. 3. The Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 47.

35 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 182-184. The work they refer to for this analysis is Lance E. Davis and Robert Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

36 See A.S.J. Baster, The Imperial Banks, London: P. S. King & Sons, 1929.

37 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 172-173.

38 H. J. Habakkuk, “Free Trade and Commercial Expansion, 1853-1870,” in John Holland Rose, Arthur Percival Newton and Ernest Alfred Benians (eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Empire. 2. The Growth of the New Empire 1783-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940, p. 787.

39 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 238-240.

40 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 48. The actual figure he gives is 988.

41 A.S.J. Baster, The Imperial Banks, op. cit. (note 36).

42 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 229-275.

43 H. J. Habakkuk, “Free Trade and Commercial Expansion,” op. cit. (note 38), p. 798-799. See also Andrew Smith, “Patriotism, Self-Interest and the ‘Empire Effect’: Britishness and British Decisions to Invest in Canada, 1867-1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2013, p. 66-71.

44 Tinashe Nyamunda and Admire Mseba, “Money in South-Central Africa, 1890-1931: Africans, Imperial Sterling, and Colonial Economy-Building,” African Studies Review, vol. 66, no. 3, 2023, p. 618-636. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2023.16.

45 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 4.

46 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 112.

47 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1).

48 For instance, see English translation of leading article in Die Afrikaanse Patriot, 14 March 1882. London (United Kingdom), Standard Bank Archive, London Metropolitan Archives: CLC/B/207/ST11/02/005/001. Indeed, Barker suggests that the politics around this was one of the reasons why the word “British” was removed from the Bank’s name in 1883. See J. R. K. Barker, ‘The Advent of the Imperial Banks,” op. cit. (note 13), p. 195.

49 J. R. K. Barker, ‘The Advent of the Imperial Banks,” op. cit. (note 13), p. 204-205.

50 Jonathan Massey, “Risk Design,” Grey Room, no. 54, Winter 2014, p. 6-33. URL: https://www.greyroom.org/issues/54/10/risk-design/. Accessed 19 December 2024.

51 On this notion of semiotics and corporate architecture, see Kim Dovey, “Corporate Towers and Symbolic Capital,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 19, no. 2, 1992, p. 173-188. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/b190173.

52 Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance,” op. cit. (note 27).

53 Mae N. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand: The Chinese Question in South Africa and the Apogee of White Settlerism,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 91, 2017, p. 59. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26426573. Accessed 19 December 2024. See also Idem, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics, New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2021.

54 Karen Harris, “The 1907 strike: A watershed in South African white miner trade unionism,” African Historical Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 1991, p. 44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00232089185310031.

55 Gary Kynoch, “Controlling the Coolies: Chinese Mineworkers and the Struggle for Labor in South Africa, 1904-1910,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2003, p. 309-29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3559386.

56 For the white supremacism of the early, empire-wide trade union movement, see Jonathan Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 12, no. 4, 1999, p. 398-421. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6443.00098. See also John Higginson, “Privileging the Machines: American Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africa's Deep-Level Gold Mines, 1902-1907,” International Review of Social History, vol. 52, no. 1, 2007, p. 1-34. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44583537. Accessed 19 December 2024.

57 Alan Jeeves, “The control of migratory labour on the South African gold mines in the era of Kruger and Milner,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1975, p. 3-29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057077508707940.

58 For insights on how this arrangement facilitated and entrenched what some have called “racialized capitalism,” see “Nation and Ethnicity in South Africa,” in Neville Alexander, Against Racial Capitalism: Selected Writings, edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala, London: Pluto Press, 2023 (Black Critique), p. 102-113.

59 Mae N. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand,” op. cit. (note 53), p. 67.

60 Ibid., p. 72.

61 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain, op. cit. (note 1)., p. 83.

62 Keith Breckenridge, “The allure of violence: Men, race and masculinity on the South African goldmines, 1900-1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 1998, p. 669-693. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079808708596.

63 Jonathan Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class,” op. cit. (note 56).

64 Ibid., p. 418.

65 Liz McFall and Francis Dodsworth, “Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance in the Long Nineteenth-Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, p. 30-54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01341.x; Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, “Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895-1915,” in David Ward and Olivier Zunz (eds.), The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940, Baltimore, MD; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 129-159; Iain S. Black, “Spaces of Capital: Bank Office Building in the City of London, 1830-1870,” Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 26, no. 3, 2000, p. 351-375. For advertising media in general during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, including in relation to Africa and the Boer War, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914, London: Verso, 1991. See also Liz McFall, “The Language of the Walls: Putting Promotional Saturation in Historical Context,” Consumption Markets & Culture, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, p. 107-128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1025386042000246188.

66 Liz McFall and Francis Dodsworth, “Fabricating the Market,” p. 30-32.

67 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 (originally published in French in 1972), and idem, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, [Originally published in French in 1979 ; trans. Richard Nice], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. See also Kim Dovey, “Corporate Towers and Symbolic Capital,” op. cit. (note 51), p. 173-188.

68 Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, “Corporate Identity,” op. cit. (note 65), p. 129-159; Mona Domosh, “Corporate Cultures and the Modern Landscape of New York City,” in Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (eds.), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992, p. 72-85.

69 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, Chicago, OT: Chicago University Press, 2008, p. 16-19.

70 The Star, 5 Nov. 1908, p. 6.

71 James A. Henry, The Standard Bank’s Early Days, op. cit. (note 15), p. 8-9.

72 Alexandra Quantrill, “The Value of Enclosure and the Business of Banking,” Grey Room, no. 71, 2018, p. 116-137. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26778485. Accessed 20 December 2024.

73 Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank, op. cit. (note 7), p. 176-177.

74 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, op. cit. (note 10), p. 177. See also Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, op. cit. (note 28), p. 69.

75 Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 122-123.

76 Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “The Larkin’s Technologies of Trust,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 77, no. 3, 2018, p. 300-318. URL: https://comparativemedia.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/ZCAlexander_Larkin%27s_Technologies_of_Trust.pdf. Accessed 19 December 2024.

77 Rand Daily Mail, 7 Nov. 1908, p. 5.

78 T. R. H. Davenport, “The South African Rebellion, 1914,” English Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 306, 1963, p. 73-94. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/559800. Accessed 20 December 2024. For Theal, see D. M. Schreuder, “The Imperial Historian as ‘Colonial Nationalist’: George McCall Theal and the Making of South African History,” in Gordon Martel (ed.), Studies in British Imperial History: Essays in Honour of A. P. Thornton, Houndmills, 1986, p. 95-158.

79 Susan Parnell, “Sanitation, segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act: African exclusion from Johannesburg's Malay Location, 1897-1925,” Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 17, no. 3, 2006, p. 271-288. URL: https://geoprodig.cnrs.fr/items/show/68288. Accessed 20 December 2024.

80 Jeremy Kirkler, “The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre,” The Historical Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, 1999, p. 1051-1075. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3020936. Accessed 20 December 2024.

81 Deryck Schreuder, “Colonial Nationalism and ‘tribal nationalism’: Making the White South African State, 1899-1910,” in John Eddy and Derick Schreuder, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa first assert their nationalities, 1880-1914, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988, p. 192-247.

82 Andries Bezuidenhout and Sakhela Buhlungu, “From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa,” Antipode, vol. 43, no. 2, 2011, p. 237-263. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00758.x.

83 For this kind of architecture and its effects, see Robert K. Home, “From barrack compounds to the single-family house: Planning worker housing in colonial Natal and Northern Rhodesia,” Planning

Perspectives, vol. 15, no. 4, 2000, p. 327-347. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/026654300420945; Zandi Sherman, “Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race,” e-flux Architecture, special issue Coloniality of Infrastructure, 2021. URL: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411239/infrastructures-and-the-ontological-question-of-race/. Accessed 27 March 2024.

84 Lindsay Weiss, “Exceptional Space: Concentration Camps and Labor Compounds in Late Nineteenth-Century South Africa,” in Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska (eds.), Archaeologies of Internment, Springer: New York, NY, 2011 (One World Archaeology), p. 21-32.

85 Jean-Jacques Van Helten, “Empire and High Finance,” op. cit. (note 27), p. 537.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-07), South Africa, by William H. Stucke.
Crédits Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 581k
Titre Figure 2: Ferreira, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand mining landscape (c. 1900).
Crédits Source: F. E. Pollard, c. 1900. URL: https://www.wayfarersbookshop.com/​pages/​books/​437/​africa-south-africa-johannesburg-f-e-pollard-gold-mining/​collection-of-thirty-original-gelatin-silver-photos-of-gold-mines-and-refining-plants-of-the. Accessed 20 December 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 281k
Titre Figure 3: The South African branch distribution network of the Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. The black dots represent individual branches.
Crédits Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 412k
Titre Figure 4: Assaying equipment and environment: Assay Office, Bulawayo branch, Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. (1901).
Crédits Source: Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 194.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 342k
Titre Figure 5: Detail of exterior (upper level) of the Standard Bank headquarters, Johannesburg (1905-1907).
Crédits Source: G. A. Bremner.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 492k
Titre Figure 6: Elevation drawing (1905), Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-7), by William H. Stucke.
Crédits Source: Stucke Bannister Archive [now destroyed]. Reproduced in Clive M. Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture & Society 1880s-1960s, Cape Town: David Philip, 1993, p. 57.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 547k
Titre Figure 7: Union Buildings, Pretoria, South Africa (1910-13), by Herbert Baker.
Crédits Source: Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities, London: Country Life, 1944.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 171k
Titre Figure 8: Bankers’ Baroque: Three examples of Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd. Branch buildings: (top) Salisbury, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe); (middle) Kimberley, South Africa; (bottom) Bulawayo, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). These buildings are all roughly contemporary with one another and with that in Johannesburg.
Crédits Source: T. G. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. 1862-1913, Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1914.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 175k
Titre Figure 9: Standard Bank of British South Africa Ltd., Johannesburg (1905-1907), South Africa: main banking hall, from different angles (c.1908).
Crédits Source: [left] Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 177; [right] The Star, 5 Nov. 1908.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 272k
Titre Figure 10: Some of the thousands of Chinese coolie labourers assembled on the Witwatersrand at their residential compound.
Crédits Source: Johannesburg (South Africa), Transnet Heritage Library, ZA 0375-LS-LS_05_002.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 179k
Titre Figure 11: Underground mining—a dangerous business: miners work the rockface (stope) in at New Primrose gold mine on the Rand.
Crédits Source: F. E. Pollard, c. 1900, source.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 359k
Titre Figure 12: This is the only surviving copy of the plan to the basement of the Standard Bank headquarters building in Johannesburg. The original plan and drawings for the building were destroyed c. 2018. The main strongroom is located in the middle of the plan, with the “patrol passage” around it highlighted in red (colour added).
Crédits Source: Stucke Bannister Archive [now destroyed]. Reproduced in J. J. Bruwer, Heritage Assessment Surveying Form: (Third) Standard Bank Chambers, Johannesburg, 2004. URL: https://www.heritageregister.org.za/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Standard%20Bank%20Chambers%20-%202002%20Survey%20-%20Bruwer.pdf. Accessed 20 December 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 453k
Titre Figure 13: Standard Bank operatives unloading gold bullion at the Johannesburg railway station(c. 1896).
Crédits Source: Carolyn Terry, A Pioneer Bank in a Pioneer Land, Cape Town, W. J. Flesch & Partners, 1979, p. 176.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 377k
Titre Figure 14: “The Growth of Johannesburg” as seen through the development of its principal bank.
Crédits Source: Rand Daily Mail, November 1908.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 123k
Titre Figure 15: Early “native” labourers’ compound, Witwatersrand (c.1900).
Crédits Source: Figure 8 in Christo Vosloo, “Extreme apartheid: the South African system of migrant labour and its hostels,” Image & Text, no. 34, 2020. DOI: 10.17159/2617-3255/2020/n34a1.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16503/img-15.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 538k
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G. A. Bremner, « Gold Standard Exploits: Bank Building in Colonial Johannesburg »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 12 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16503 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13936

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G. A. Bremner

Professor of Architectural History, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5639-8431

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