‘A special relationship and its mutual benefits, which history has bound us in’ is how Nelson Mandela described relations between Britain and South Africa in the spring of 2001. The tragedy is that for most of the twentieth century this ‘special relationship’ was compromised, first by jingoistic Britain, then by Afrikaner nationalist South Africa. This book is about that tragedy.

We have worked together, with a shared outlook, over many years, with the long-term intention of producing a study more comprehensive than either of us could have managed to write by ourselves. Since it is based overwhelmingly on fundamental research in British government archives, there are two inevitable limitations. One is that the perspective is mainly, though not exclusively, from the British side – so the book finds its home in the general field of British imperial and Commonwealth history, as well as South African history. The other is that the emphasis is on the period before the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, the British government's ‘thirty-year rule of access’ – in practice more like thirty-five years – preventing us from tackling the issues after the 1960s with anything like the authority we hope we bring to the period before then.

Our main concern is with inter-governmental relations, and we do not aim to give an account of the long British tradition of radical and liberal criticism of what happened in South Africa.