This book provides an in-depth analysis of the emergence of a racially divided society in pre-industrial Southern Africa.

First Published in 1990. Volume Two of Studies of Economic History of South Africa, looks at the Lesotho and Swaziland regions. The unfolding history and historiography of Southern Africa pose profound challenges for both analysis and praxis in the last decade of the twentieth century. These challenges are reflected in the range of investigations and contradictions, some of which are treated here, which together constitute an intellectual and political conjuncture. This collection of studies deals with the countries which were not included in the companion book on the economic history of the Front- Line States. Most of the space in the present volume is devoted to South Africa, primarily because of its importance to the region but also because contributions to the economic history of that country in English are very extensive as compared to the other states of Southern Africa.

1. REFLECTIONS ON A THEME by ROBERT ROSS This book, the fourth in the series Comparative Studies in Overseas History, and, like its predecessors, the product of a symposium held by the Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, is organised around a single theme, the relationship between the ideological structures of domination and oppression that have come to be called racism and the political and economic ones which grew out of Europe's conquering and ruling much of the rest of the world. By racism, we mean those systems of thought in which group characteristics of human beings, of a non-somatic nature, are considered to be fixed by principles of descent and in which, in general, physical attributes (other than those of sex) are the main sign by which characteristics are attributed. In addition, almost by definition, the systems of thought entailed in this require that there is a hierarchy of the various races, and that those people in the lower ranks of that hierarchy are seriously disadvantaged, at least if the proponents of racist thought are able to impose their will on the society in which they live. ! The exclusion of the discrimination of women from the concept of racism should not be thought as entailing that racist and sexist ideas do not have much in common, since both derive from essentially biological determinism, and indeed 2 racist societies have historically almost invariably been strongly sexist.

This book examines five hundred years of South African economic history.

`Darryl Glaser supplies an illuminating overview of the scholarship since 1970 on South Africa′s political history. His emphasis is on the debates between liberals, Marxists, and to a lesser extent "post-structuralists" about the origins and the course of South Africa′s racial order′ - Tom Lodge, University of Witwatersrand `A well-researched, well-argued, readable, interesting, informative and competent study′ - Capital and Class Providing a wide-ranging and critical introduction to contemporary South Africa, this book uses an interdisciplinary lens to introduce the student to the main debates, historical context, and issues that have characterized the study of South Africa over the last three decades. Key topics include: the role of colonialism, capitalism and modernity in the formation of the racial order; changes in the South African state; questions of class, race and ehtnicity; black resistance; and the transition to democracy. A number of underlying debates are critically evaluated. For exmple, the contribution of materialist and class-analytic approaches, the application of post-structuralism and theories of modernity, and the prospects for democratic liberalism and socialism in post-apartheid South Africa.

This is the first book to combine a discussion of post-apartheid development initiatives with an extended historical analysis of South Africa's dynamic race, class, gender and ethnic identities. Bringing together the research of an historical geographer and two development geographers, the book enables us to locate the post-apartheid transition in a broad historical and spatial perspective. Within this perspective, the limitations as well as the achievements of South Africa's current transformation are highlighted.

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.