Book reviews -- Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War by Thomas Borstelmann

Thomas Borstelmann's impressive study of American policy toward southern Africa, and especially South Africa, in the years of the Truman administration greatly elaborates what Thomas J. Noer wrote on that topic in Cold War and Black Liberation (1985). Borstelmann is good at setting policy against the background of the history of South Africa and the United States between 1945 and 1952, and he ably explores the contradiction between, on the one hand, Harry S. Truman's 1948 civil rights platform and "free world" rhetoric and, on the other, the forging of closer links with the new apartheid government. Though trade and American investment grew during this period, Borstelmann does not lay major emphasis on economic interests...