PRIVILEGED MINORITIES, a Jacana pocket history

189pp., paperback, Jacana, First South African Edition, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781431437061

First published in the United States of America by Ohio University Press.

Mesrob Vartavarian examines how a country like South Africa, shaped by anti-colonial struggle, has become fertile ground for wealth concentration, enriching only select groups within the political and corporate spheres while leaving the majority working class behind.

Vartavarian argues that minorities in anti-colonial movements secure exclusive advantages, including land seizures, racialised labour systems, access to coercive institutions, favourable regulatory environments and how distinct sociocultural groups in South Africa have navigated and negotiated these advantages, from the Dutch colonial era through the rise and decline of African National Congress rule. He also reveals how challenges from marginalised groups often served to reshape entrenched advantages by incorporating new actors into existing structures rather than dismantling minority privilege, producing composite systems of accumulation that have sustained inequality.

Mesrob Vartavarian is currently a consultant at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. He has held research fellowships and teaching positions at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego, and has published extensively on the formation and evolution of power elites in the Global South.