In this book I compare the evolving matrix of race and class relations in two societies that are widely regarded as being the most pervasively racist in the world, South Africa and the Southern United States. My particular concern is the origins of the system and ideology called segregation, which emerged in mature form in the American South after about 1890 and in South Africa around the time of the Union of 1910. Segregation in my view should be distinguished from the broader ethos of white supremacy, of which segregation is a distinct form. Unlike slavery or serfdom, which are characterized by vertical forms of domination – white over black – the lines of authority in segregation are primarily horizontal, depending not only on the direct exercise of force and personal intimidation but on some degree of accommodation and tacit acceptance on the part of those whom it is designed to control.

Although it owed much to the white supremacist past of slavery and the frontier, segregation was not merely a direct continuation of previous forms of social relations and control. As a system, if not in all of its particular parts, it was essentially new. As I explain in the first chapter, the histories of South Africa and the American South, and in particular the white supremacist cultures that were the products of those histories, would account for all sorts of “solutions” other than the path that was taken.