Colonial South Africa And The Origins Of The Racial Order

An analysis of the origins of South Africa's racial order, Dr Keegan argues that the Cape, rather than the industrial Highveld, was the seedbed of dispossession and accumulation out of which the racial state of South Africa emerged.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Daniel Littlefield's investigation of colonial South Carolinianss preference for some African ethnic groups over others as slaves reveals how the Africans' diversity and capabilities inhibited the development of racial stereotypes and influenced their masters' perceptions of slaves. It also highlights how South Carolina, perhaps more than anywhere else in North America, exemplifies the common effort of Africans and Europeans in molding American civilization.

South Africa's ancient past is categorized into two eras: the Stone Age and the Iron Age, distinguished by overarching technological traits. The designation of these areas as a World Heritage site ensued from the discovery of hominins in Taung and australopithecine fossils within limestone caves at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai. The early inhabitants of South Africa were denoted as the Khoisan, Khoi Khoi, and San. The Middle Paleolithic predecessors are believed to be the forebears of the native San and Khoikhoi tribes. Their collective name, the Khoisan, is a recent European amalgamation of these two tribes. The Khoisan's habitation in southern Africa aligns with the earliest divergence of all contemporary Homo sapiens groups, genetically connected to matrilinear haplogroup L0 (mtDNA) and patrilinear haplogroup A (Y-DNA), originating in the northwestern region of southern Africa. The key distinction between the San and Khoikhoi lies in their respective occupations. The Khoikhoi were pastoral herders, while the San were hunter-gatherers. The historical origins of the Khoikhoi remain unclear.

A survey of the whole of South African history from pre-colonial times to 1999, suitable for serious students of the subject. It handles all major topics, with special focus on the dramatic changes that have occured since 1990.