White Supremacy:

...Unlike South Africa, the North American colonies offered settlers millions of acres of rich soil as well as a system of rivers that provided access to the land and stimulated the growth of a market economy...

...Nor did the British government in the American colonies or the Dutch (and later British) government in South Africa succeed in limiting white expansion into the interior...

...Dutch reactions to Cape indigenes, the Khoikhoi or "Hottentots," were shaped by earlier experiences of conquest in the East Indies, while British dealings with American Indians reflected Britain's claim to sovereignty over "barbarous" Ireland...

...Both the Khoikhoi and the American Indian were regarded as inferior human specimens, and neither Dutch nor British wasted time in laying claim to the indigenes' territories...

...In the case of the development of race relations in the United States and South Africa, one of these variables was demography...

...Like the United States, South Africa resisted British rule and pushed for inde-pendence, It went through phases of attracting immigrants from Europe and Asia, of exploiting its natural resources and of betraying black aspirations after a struggle for unification...

...Another was geography and the possibilities it promised for economic expansion...

...In each region whites relied on imported rather than indigenous labor, Americans bought West African slaves, while Cape colonists obtained slaves from East Africa, Madagascar, and the East Indies...

...In other words - and Fredrickson stresses this - the Civil War mattered...

...Instead Fredrickson focuses on crucial aspects (some associated with specific periods, some with geography and geopolitics) of the evolution of white supremacy in the United States and South Africa, giving us a sustained analysis of similarities and differences...

...As Fredrickson makes clear, the ultimate goal of comparative history is to account for critical variables...

...White Supremacy, although dense with detail, is accessible to the lay historian...

...For these reasons it is easy to imagine a note of moral smugness pervading any comparison, by an American, of the history of race relations in the two countries...

...By the early 1700's both the Cape and the American tidewater colonies had become slave societies...

...The Dutch intended to establish a trading outpost, the British to build a civilization on the model of Europe...

...In South Africa the doctrine of apartheid (literally, "apartness," or separation of the races) has been legally instituted and blacks have been disenfranchised...

...Both countries have made self-conscious efforts to establish white skin as a prerequisite for civil rights, and both have come close to pushing the notion of racial differentiation to its extreme and logical outcome: a Her-renvolk or master race society...

...Yet the American Constitution prohibited denial of rights on grounds of race...

...Neither does he flatten history into a series of theoretical mirror images nor advance a preconceived formula to explain the complex relationship of economics and ethnic consciousness...

...Fred-erickson points out that the institution of racial slavery was intimately linked to tensions within the white social order, with the dehumanization of blacks creating a dustrialization occurred late (1890...

...Nonetheless, the United States and South Africa have diverged radically in their official commitments regarding racial equality...

...For unlike the Afrikaner struggle for unification that came to final fruition in 1961, the American victory of northern over southern cause was inspired not by a sense of ethnic exclusiveness but by a commitment to equality...

...Both countries were settled in the early 1600's by northern European Protestants: the The universalistic conceptions of human freedom on which the U.S...

...in the United States integration is the de jure policy and blacks are - in theory - full members of the civil community...

...It is written largely without jargon and includes chronologies, footnotes, and an index...

...The universalistic conceptions of human freedom on which the United States was founded were reaffirmed in the Civil War and institutionalized during Reconstruction...

...For both the Cape and North American colonies were essentially frontiers, lacking the cohesiveness imparted by a metropolitan authority...

...But in South Africa the abolition of chattel slavery occurred early (1838) and inDutch at the Cape of Good Hope, the British in Virginia...

...nonetheless - despite different motives for colonization - Dutch and British had similar attitudes toward the indigenous peoples...

...basis for inter-class unity among whites...

...Kathryn Marshall OF the multiracial societies that resulted from European expansion between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States and South Africa have most obstinately upheld a belief in white supremacy...

...was founded were reaffirmed and institutionalized...

...While South Africa's Boers were wandering with their herds, Americans were clearing and cultivating, and it was this preoccupation with "Europeanization" which led, initially, to a more brutal dispossession of the indigenous population and finally to a more deeply entrenched determination to perpetuate black slavery...

...The resulting pattern was one of integrating blacks into the industrial work force as the main source of labor but under conditions that kept them from acquiring economic or political leverage...

...But George M. Fredrickson, William Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and the author of two well-regarded studies in American history, does not moralize...