As the reader will have noticed, this book is about white people. In the comparatively recent past – in the American South after about 1890, in South Africa after about 1910 – two traditionally racist societies dedicated to maintaining white supremacy were becoming increasingly competitive. Fundamental social changes were taking place: the early stages of industrialization and urbanization, the formation of industrial elites and proletariats, the consolidation of state or, in the American case, of party systems; that is, changes in all those diverse but ultimately related areas that Marxists sweepingly label structure and superstructure. To those in power, who sought ways by which their societies might absorb such massive and explosive energy, the period was one of intense crisis. In their view the very basis of social order was being threatened severely. The primarily vertical lines of authority and deference characteristic of traditional white supremacy were breaking down. New, mainly horizontal patterns of social and political relations, mechanisms of control that had been undreamt of in the plantation and frontier histories of South Africa and the American South before the late nineteenth century, were desperately required.

To meet this crisis, the power of the state was invoked at an accelerated pace that sometimes left contemporaries on both sides of the color line gasping for breath. In the decade or so after 1890 the Southern states frequently conspired with each other to enact an impressive array of Jim Crow laws and to disfranchise black and many poor-white voters.