History

A Developmental History of Durban:

It was the British who would make the first significant and successful attempts at developing Durban into the shipping and manufacturing center that it is in modern times. Not long after the British establishment of the Colony of Natal, Durban experienced a large influx of 4,000 settlers over the span of just three years. Shortly after this first wave of settlement, sugar was found to be a very profitable export crop to European markets and thereafter the focus of Durban's development was the production and export of sugar. This development effort ushered in a second wave of population influx into the Durban area, most of them laborers imported from India. So large was the import of Indian labor during this time that their descendants account for a significant portion of Durban's present day population.

Durban's role as a node for the extraction-oriented practices of the European colonial powers was augmented in the years that followed the sugar boom, first by the discovery of gold in the Transvaal (present day Gauteng) and later by the discovery of coal in Dundee area of KwaZulu-Natal. Railroad lines connecting Durban to natural resource centers in the hinterland were laid and as volume of natural resources shipped out of the port grew with each new train, so did the city. The extraction of natural resources was so central to the development of Durban that by 1895 a rail line connected the city to Johannesburg, the center of the gold mining industry. Ten years later, bolstered by the coal frenzy in Dundee, Maydon Wharf was constructed to increase the capacity of the port and to accommodate the largest ocean-going ships. Eventually, the focus of economic activity shifted away from natural resource extraction and became focused on manufacturing. The first industries to emerge in Durban were those advantaged of the availability of natural resources such as wood, coal, and sugar as well as the increasing importance of Durban's port as center for international trade. These industries were food and sugar processing, the manufacture of wood products and textiles, and to some extent production of petrochemicals. These first industries were so successful that even today they make up the industrial-base of the city.