A detailed history of South Africa as a Portuguese and Dutch colony, from 1505-1795, first published in 1907.

George McCall Theal (1837-1919) was a prolific South African historian and civil servant. After working as a missionary between 1875-1880 he was appointed magistrate of Tamacha before taking a position as a clerk in the government and became Keeper of the Cape Colony Archives. He was appointed Colonial Historiographer in 1891. These volumes, first published in 1908, contain Theal's detailed history of South Africa between 1795-1894. Focusing on the political history of the country, Theal explores the British control of Cape Colony and the reactions of the Dutch setters to increasing British immigration, discussing the political consequences of the establishment of the various Boer Republics and the growth of Zulu power in South Africa. These volumes provide valuable details on the political history of South Africa, and reveal contemporary attitudes towards the history and ideas of colonisation. Volume 5 covers the colonies between 1854-1894.

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.