The Cambridge History of South Africa

An important reassessment of South Africa's history and a significant new tool for students and academics of African history worldwide.

Carolyn Hamilton (Edited by), Bernard K. Mbenga (Edited by), Robert Ross (Edited by)

9780521517942, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 November 2009

472 pages
23.5 x 16 x 3 cm, 0.79 kg

'It is both a credit and a boon to the study of South African history to have all this in one place.' Journal of African History

Coming fifteen years after South Africa's achievement of majority rule, this book takes a critical and searching look at the country's past. It presents South Africa's past in an objective, clear, and refreshing manner. With chapters contributed by ten of the best historians of the country, the book elaborately weaves together new data, interpretations, and perspectives on the South African past, from the Early Iron Age to the eve of the mineral revolution on the Rand. Its findings incorporate new sources, methods, and concepts, for example providing new data on the relations between Africans and colonial invaders and rethinking crucial issues of identity and consciousness. This book represents an important reassessment of all the major historical events, developments, and records of South Africa - written, oral, and archaeological - and will be an important new tool for students and professors of African history worldwide.

Introduction Robert Ross, Carolyn Hamilton and Bernard Mbenga
1. Food production in Southern Africa 1000 to 2000 years ago John Parkington and Simon Hall
2. Farming communities of the second millennium: internal frontiers, identity, continuity and change Simon Hall
3. Khoesan and immigrants: the emergence of colonial society in the Cape, 1500–1800 Robert Ross
4. Turbulent times: political transformations in the North and East, 1760s–1830s John Wright
5. From slave economy to settler capitalism: the Cape colony and its extensions, 1800–1854 Martin Legassick and Robert Ross
6. From colonial hegemonies to imperial conquest, 1840–1880 Patrick Harries, Norman Etherington and Bernard Mbenga
7. Transformations in consciousness Paul Landau.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH], General & world history [HBG]