Colonial South Africa Origins Racial Order

It is a story that is strong in notable events -slave emancipation, the arrival of the 1820 British settlers, a series of frontier wars, the Great Trek of Boer emigrants - as well as in striking personalities, among them Dr John Philip, Andries Stockenstrom, John Fairbairn, Moshoeshoe and Sir Harry Smith. In Keegan's pages these familiar historical landmarks and characters emerge in entirely novel ways, the subject of fresh interpretations and original insights.

A unique overview of the whole 350-year history of South Africa’s racial order, from the mid-seventeenth century to the apartheid era. Maylam periodizes this racial order, drawing out its main phases and highlighting the significant turning points. He also analyzes the dynamics of South African white racism, exploring the key forces and factors that brought about and perpetuated oppressive, discriminatory policies, practices, structures, laws and attitudes. There is also a strong historiographical dimension to the study. It shows how various writers have, from different perspectives, attempted to explain the South African racial order and draws out the political and ideological agendas that lay beneath these diverse interpretations. Essential reading for all those interested in the past, present and future of South Africa, this book also has implications for the wider study of race, racism and social and political ethnic relations.

This work looks at the period of South African history before the mineral age, and particularly the years of British rule up to the 1850s, and establishes its importance in the shaping of South African society. It argues that the roots of the 20th-century racial state lie in this period, when the Cape was first integrated into the British empire of free trade.

The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire examines the transformation and the gradual creation of colonial racial order on an American and a South African frontier, respectively. This study focuses on the Ohio Country (a region including parts of present-day western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan) and the South African Eastern Cape (a region located on the southeastern tip of the African continent) in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. This book compares and juxtaposes the processes of indigenous dispossession and white efforts at undermining Native American and African sovereignty. While the scenarios in the Ohio Country and the Eastern Cape did not repeat themselves identically in other locations, comparable patterns would emerge in later years as the United States expanded westward and Britain expanded into southern and eastern Africa. Christoph Strobel explores how various white and indigenous people tried to shape the creation of colonial racial order in the two regions. An emerging compromise among white settlers, government officials, and other white interest groups gradually led to the implementation of systems of colonial racial order in both the Ohio Country and the Eastern Cape by the mid-nineteenth century. This transformation, shaped by violence, conflict, and cooperation, left a legacy that influenced the development of colonization and the contested construction and representation of race in the United States, southern Africa, and around the world.

In this book, William Kelleher Storey shows that guns and discussions about guns during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were fundamentally important to the establishment of racial discrimination in South Africa. Relying mainly on materials held in archives and libraries in Britain and South Africa, Storey explains the workings of the gun trade and the technological development of the firearms. He relates the history of firearms to ecological, political, and social changes, showing that there is a close relationship between technology and politics in South Africa.

How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa? Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others—women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's minority groups were being defined in relation to stereotypes of black South Africans. These stereotypes, in turn, were used to justify both new capitalist class and gender hierarchies in England and the subhuman treatment of blacks in South Africa. Bearing this in mind, Zine Magubane considers how marginalized groups in both countries responded to these racialized representations. Revealing the often overlooked links among ideologies of race, class, and gender, Bringing the Empire Home demonstrates how much black Africans taught the English about what it meant to be white, poor, or female.

History is a powerful aid to the understanding of the present, and those who are concerned with the escalating crisis in South Africa will find this an invaluable source book. This is the story of the evolution of a society in which race became the dominant characteristic, the primary determinant of status, wealth, and power. Cultural chauvinism of the first European colonists – primarily the Dutch – merged with economic and demographic developments to create a society in which whites relegated all blacks – free blacks, Africans, imported slaves – to a systematic pattern of subordination and oppression that foreshadowed the apartheid of the twentieth century. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the new empire-builders, the British, reinforced the racial order. In the next century and a half the industrialized South Africa would become firmly integrated into the world economy. Published originally in South Africa in 1979 and updated and expanded now, a decade later, this book by twelve South African, British, Canadian, Dutch, and American scholars is the most comprehensive history of the early years of that troubled nation. The authors put South Africa in the comparative context of other colonial systems. Their social, political, and economic history is rich with empirical data and rests on a solid base of archival research. The story they tell is a complex drama of a racial structure that has resisted hostile impulses from without and rebellion from within.

This book assesses South African history within imperial and global networks of power, trade and communication. South African modernity is understood in terms of the interplay between internal and external forces. Key historical themes, including the emergence of an industrialised economy, the development of systematic racial discrimination and popular resistance against racial power, and the influence of national and ethnic identities on political and social organisation, are set out in relation to imperial and global influences. This book is central to our understanding of South Africa in the context of world history.