John Higginson
John Higginson (BS’70) majored in journalism at Northwestern University. He is a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is also a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences and the Department of History at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Mineworker, 1907-1951 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Cambridge University Press published his monograph Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 in November 2014. He has written numerous articles and book chapters on South Africa and the regional economic system of southern Africa. Just recently he contributed to a special edition of the Journal of African History on the impact of E. P. Thompson’s work on African historians. Presently, he is at work on a book that is tentatively titled The Hidden Costs of Industrialization: Southern Africa and the Global Economy, 1860-2007. He is also working on a joint research project with Joye Bowman that is tentatively titled Engineering Empire: The South African Odyssey of American Mining Engineers, 1893-1976.