Class, Caste and Color: A Social and Economic History of the South African Western Cape.

Just a few years ago the conventional wisdom was that the early period of European colonialism in the region around Cape Town was largely irrelevant when compared to the industrial revolution that unfolded in the north during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Today the study of pre-industrial em has moved from a relative backwater to the center stage of South African historical writing. Class, Caste and Color, an early and flawed exercise in this new revisionism, emerged from a 1986 conference held at the University of Cape Town. Like many edited volumes Class, Caste and Color is of uneven quality. Many of the chapters still seem like papers hastily written in the week before the conference. More seriously, the book is conceptually weak and, often, simply empirically wrong. To begin with the editors never clearly define the Western Cape. They nonetheless argue that the Western Cape was "the only" region of South Africa "to have experienced slavery," a claim which is simply incorrect. They also insist that a "racial paternalism" developed in this ambiguously defined area, but one looks in vain for a clear definition and discussion of either race or paternalism.

The individual chapters cover the period from the founding of a colonial settlement in Cape Town in 1652 to the urban revolts of the 1980s. Because Class, Caste and Color covers such a broad swath of time, there is a considerable amount of new information that will be of interest to the specialist. Especially helpful are the chapters by Van Duin, Goode, and Maree on labor, unions and politics. There are, however, too many problems. A few examples will suffice. In tracing the shift from symbiotic to coercive relations between the Khoisan and colonists, Nigel Penn believes he has discovered, but need not substantiate, the origins of modern South Africa. The discussion is interesting, if the initial claims remain rather wild and unfounded. Equally problematic is Shell's brief analysis of slavery and the colonial family. Not content to explore the "familial incorporation of the slave," Shell argues that violence was negligible and it emphasis in the literature in large part the creation of "naive" abolitionists and gullible historians. Violence and the family become antithetical in Shell's formulation, and the mountains of evidence on violence thus largely irrelevant. Shell never investigates the place of violence within the family, or the ways in which slaves may not have been the credulous consumers of the master's putative hegemonic discourses.

One could go on. Many of the chapters are simply too brief, one weighing in at seven pages. The best chapters, by Giliomee on the social and economic origins of Afrikaner nationalism, and Bundy on student protest in the 1980s, have been published elsewhere. There are, however, a few rough gems in this otherwise unfortunate book. In his fleeting analysis of pre-industrial Cape Town, Robert Ross makes a plea for historians to move beyond the gospel of class and class conflict. Pinnock provides an interesting analysis of the ways in which the ideas of Le Corbusier influenced the disastrous--and racists--urban planning in Cape Town. But these are the exceptions to a very uneven collection.

What is perhaps even more remarkable is the absence of anything resembling a discussion of the history of race and racism, despite the pleas of Ross. Explaining this glaring lacuna will likely be the subject of future historians. Class, Caste and Color may be "the first general social and economic history of the Western Cape." Hopefully it will not be the last.

Clifton Crais Kenyon College