>In view of the continuing turbulence in South Africa, the analysis of its racially divided social order, and its variety of national and ethnic groupings, has become an urgent intellectual and political task. > >For much of the twentieth century an exclusive form of white Afrikaner nationalism, with the capture of the state by the white Afrikaner ‘nation’ as its explicit objective, has confronted a pan-South African nationalism, which has sought to incorporate Africans into the body politic. State policy has deliberately manipulated group differences to prevent interracial class solidarity; while, partly in response, minority groups, such as Coloureds and Indians, have constructed their own sense of community. Constitutional developments in the early 1980’s underline, once more, the pervasiveness of ethnic thinking in South Africa’s ruling class strategies. These sparked off the recent bitter opposition to the State’s reformist policies. > >These issues are explored in this volume of essays by sixteen well-known historians and social scientists. Based on extensive new research, it represents a radical reassessment of South Africa’s twentieth-century history, and provides an ideal basis for a deeper understanding of contemporary South African politics. It fully maintains the standard of the two previous volumes in this sequence, *Economy and Society in Pre-industrial South Africa*, edited by Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, and *Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa*, edited by Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone. - [back cover](https://archive.org/details/politicsofracecl0000unse/page/n483)