As World War II came to a close, the foundations of South Africa's impressive economic growth, which had seemed so solid, began to shake and wobble. Sporadic discontent by black and white workers erupted into a major strike wave. Alliances between employers and the state over labor policy gave way to increasingly acrimonious conflicts. Electoral support for the government, particularly by white workers and Afrikaners, collapsed. Seizing the opportunities created by these conditions, Afrikaner nationalists mobilized within the white population and across class lines and won the 1948 election. A new word, apartheid, would henceforth frame the construction and analysis of South Africa.

The parallels between the early post-World War II upheavals in South Africa and those accompanying the end of World War I have often been noted. Both periods were marked by strong waves of social and political unrest, and both led to a radical shift in the governing coalition and a further entrenchment of racial distinctions. Belying these apparent similarities, however, stand the radical transformations that took place in the local and international relationships among labor, capital, and the state during the interwar period. By the mid-1940s four great changes had seemingly resolved the post-World War I crisis.

First, there was an unprecedented burst of industrial activity based on the reorganization of relationships with nearby peripheral areas and with overseas core areas. Second, the almost two-decade-long intensification of the confrontation between white workers on the one side and the state and capital on the other gave way to a period of relative labor peace.