Colonial Natal has become an increasingly popular field of investigation for historians of Southern Africa over the last decade or so. This trend is not premature or " irrelevant for, although not demonstrating" the economic impact of the diamond-mining industry of the Cape, or the gold-mining industry of the Transvaal, the political " economy of nineteenth century Natal played a significant role in forming patterns of South African social and economic development, as well as attitudes towards this, not least of all in terms of labour exploitation. The history of Natal during this period has been lacking by and large in what I consider to be two important aspects. Firstly, the colony, on the whole, has been neglected by Marxist and radical historians; and secondly, the history of women in South Africa, as yet a nascent area of research in itself, has not included an attempt to date, understand the lives of those women who lived along the south-east coastal belt of Southern Africa, between the Drakensberg and the Indian Ocean. This study strives to be a preliminary step in the direction of redressing this imbalance, by offering an introductory exposition on the political economy of women in colonial Natal. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1982.

This study is a gendered historical analysis of the legal administration of Indian Immigrants in British Colonial Natal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing primarily on the attempts of the Natal Government to intervene in the personal law of especially indentured and ex-indentured Indians, this thesis presents an analysis of the role that gender played in the conceptualization and promulgation of the indentured labour scheme in Natal, and in the subsequent regulation of the lives of Indian immigrants in the Colony. It traces the developments in the administration of Indian women, especially, from the beginning of the indenture system in colonial Natal until the passage of the Indian Marriages Bill of 1907 and attempts to contextualize arguments around these themes within broader colonial discourses and debates, as well as to examine the particularity of such administrative attempts in the Natal context. This study observes the changing nature of 'custom' amongst Indian immigrants and the often simultaneous and contradictory attempts of the Natal colonial administration to at first support, and later, to intervene in what constituted the realm of the customary. Through an analysis of legal administration at different levels of government, this analysis considers the interactions of gender and utilitarian legal discourse under colonialism and, in particular, the complex role of Indian personal law and the ordinary civil laws of the Colony of Natal in both restricting and facilitating the mobility of Indian women brought to Natal under the auspices of the indentured labour system. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.