Publisher's Synopsis
A selection of the best of recent research on the shaping of apartheid between the 1940s and the 1960s. It shows how apartheid, with its massive apparatus of social regulation and political control, can be viewed as a peculiar South African response to the twin forces of industrialization and urbanization. This was akin, in important respects, to the responses of other societies elsewhere in the world experiencing the same transformations.;The volume demonstrates how popular struggles, and countless atomised acts of non-compliance and defiance, were among the most important defining influences on the apartheid state both in terms of eliciting legislative responses and through repeatedly bending and undermining the structures that had been set in place. In so doing, the volume links the traditional "history from below" approach - which is amply represented in this collection - with the general issues which exercised the minds of previous generations of South African scholarship.
