Analyzing within one book the origins and early development of segregation in South Africa and the American South is more than an interesting academic exercise. For the two cases of modernizing race and class relations were historically connected. As we saw in Chapter 2, contemporary observers – including the English ambassador Lord Bryce, the white South African Maurice Evans, and the Afro–American missionaries Henry Turner and Levi Coppin – understood this.

The evolution of segregation in South Africa ran a decade or so behind that in America. South Africans of all races watched the American case closely and made it a germane, though not a determining, part of their own discussion. Bryce's American Commonwealth remained the standard account of race relations in the Republic. But several English-speaking South Africans, notably Howard Pim, Evans, and Charles Loram, traveled in America, studied the extensive American literature on the subject, and tried to learn from American experience. So did such influential members of the British high commissioner Sir Alfred Milner's “kindergarten” as Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, who tried to reconstruct the former Afrikaner republics after the Boer War. Because they were ordinarily less well educated, Afrikaners were not so widely engaged in this comparative analysis. The young Jan Smuts's study of Walt Whitman and his admiration for Abraham Lincoln made him a significant exception.