“South Africa First!” was the rallying cry of the National Party in 1924, aimed squarely at the Smuts government's alliance with the Randlords and Great Britain. As the post-World War I crisis erupted, key segments of the white community found common cause in protesting against the sacrifice of their interests in favor of those of the mining magnates and their political allies. The future of South Africa, Prime Ministers Louis Botha and Jan Smuts had long maintained, was married to gold and Great Britain. The National Party proposed an alternative: the country's wealth would be localized through manufacturing and agricultural production for the home market.

This appeal was not unusual: independent states outside Europe had long sought to privilege local, national interests in order to advance within the international division of labor and wealth, particularly in periods of global economic and political crisis. The 1920s offered just such conditions across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Yet only a very few states succeeded in these attempts in the interwar period. South Africa was one of these. Even before the global crash of 1929, the state had already reconfigured relationships with core countries to produce a remarkable leap forward to the production of consumer and machine goods based on an integrated steel sector. Net industrial output grew by 63 percent during the five years before 1929, a trend that continued, at a slower pace, in the five years after 1929.