Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948

John Higginson is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences and the department of history at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Mineworker, 1907-1951 (1989). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on South Africa and the regional economic system of southern Africa.

'From the epochal devastation of the South African War to the tyrannies of neo-fascists, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 explores the role of violence in the making of white supremacy. Higginson guides us through the transformation of South Africa's rural worlds, the anxieties and turmoil that consumed people's lives, and the violence that has profoundly shaped the country's history. Richly researched and closely argued, this timely book is an important reminder of a not-too-distant past, and of the troubling violence in South Africa today.' Clifton Crais, Emory University, Atlanta

• Part I. The Ashes of Defeat: 1. Introduction; 2. The etiology of guerrilla organization in the western Transvaal, July 1900 to December 1902; 3. Peonage or empire?: the reconstruction of white supremacy; 4. Milnerism, the Chinese labor experiment, and the advent of Het Volk; Part II. Sidestepping the King's Writ: 5. Ministering to the dry bones of white supremacy: from union and the 1913 Natives Land Act to the 1914 rebellion; 6. A glass brimming over: the failed 1914 rebellion in Rustenburg and Marico; 7. Turbulent cities, smoldering countryside, 1914–22; 8. After the rebellion, before the pact, 1919–24; Part III. A Hoofdliere or Boere Republic?: 9. The pact, the depression, and the stillborn republic, 1924–33; 10. A thousand little Hoofdlier, 1934–48; Epilogue.