Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa

R. L. Watson is Professor Emeritus of History at North Carolina Wesleyan College. He is the author of The Slave Question: Liberty and Property in South Africa (1990) and South Africa in Pictures (1989). His articles have appeared in journals including the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies and the South African Historical Journal.

• Introduction; Part I. THE FOUNDATIONS oF a RACIAL ORDER: 1. The passing of the slave system; 2. Labor and the economy; Part II. CULTURAL AND POLITICAL FACTORS: 3. Missions; 4. Respectability; 5. The frontier; 6. The trek; 7. Plagues; Part III. RAPE, rACE, AND VIOLENCE: 8. Violence; 9. Rape and other crimes; 10. Honor; Part IV. A RACIAL ORDER: 11. Sediment at the bottom of the mind; 12. An aristocracy of skin; Appendix.

'This book, based on meticulous research, is well written and at times deliciously sharp. It provides an unprecedented account of the ways in which both the slaves of the Cape Colony and their erstwhile owners reorganized their intertwined lives in the aftermath of abolition. For the first time, a description of Cape society is combined with a clear understanding of the shifting social ideologies that led to an enhanced South African racism. It is a singular achievement.' Robert Ross, Leiden University