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Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. By ANTHONY W. MARX. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 390 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
This is an ambitious book. It proposes a comparative explanation of the relationship between state-building and "race-making" (state policy concerning race) in "the three most prominent cases in which European settlers dominated indigenous populations or slaves of African origin" (p. 6): the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. During the late 1800s and early I9oos, Marx argues, political struggles and conflicts within the white populations of the United States and South Africa led to the enactment of stateenforced racial segregation in those countries. "Blacks were sacrificed on the altar of white unity" (p. I2) as a means to overcome regional and class divisions among United States whites, and ethnic (Boer vs. English) and class divisions among South African whites. Conversely, the relative absence of such intra-white conflict in Brazil, and the greater capacity of the Brazilian state to manage such limited tensions as did exist, removed any need to enact racial segregation...