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The Cambridge History of South Africa Vol. I: From Early Times to 1885. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga and Robert Ross. Cambridge History of South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 467; maps, index. $120.00.
Few nation-states constituted from the former British Empire have their own Cambridge History series, a privilege that emerges from the torments of history and historiography. The editors of this volume of the Cambridge History of South Africa acknowledge a previous volume about South Africa, which formed part of the Cambridge History of the British Empire series (1929-1959) (p. xii), but they do not mention the appearance of South Africa in the Cambridge History of Africa series (1975-1986). This is understandable: the South African historiography presented here is the product of anglicized settler intellectuals, who, like their American counterparts, felt their attachment to the Empire even as they critiqued it. Their principal contribution has been to challenge Whiggish versions of Empire, making the Cambridge History of South Africa an appropriate successor to the Cambridge History of the British Empire.
The preoccupation with the British Empire in a volume that purports to cover the history of South Africa from "earliest times" (about 2,000 years ago, according to the volume) to 1885 may seem surprising. After all, the British only arrived on the scene in 1806. Despite the two thousand years covered, however, five out of eight chapters deal with the nineteenth century (these five chapters include Chapter 1, which charts the production of a precolonial archive by tracing the intellectual traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).
Of those chapters that cover the period before the nineteenth century, two chapters summarize archaeological evidence up to 1800 and one chapter deals with the Western Cape from 1500 to 1800. The first of the archaeological chapters outlines the appearance and...