The development of the South African legal system in the early twentieth century was crucial to the establishment and maintenance of the systems which underpinned the racist state, including control of the population, the running of the economy, and the legitimization of the regime. Martin Chanock’s highly illuminating and definitive perspective on that development examines all areas of the law: criminal law and criminology; the Roman-Dutch law; the State’s African law; and land, labour and ‘rule of law’ questions. His revisionist analysis of the construction of South African legal culture illustrates the larger processes of legal colonization, while the consideration of the interaction between imported doctrine and legislative models with local contexts and approaches also provides a basis for understanding the re-fashioning of law under circumstances of post-colonialism and globalization.
• A contextualized account placing law in context of history of construction of the white state • Brings South Africa’s legal history towards the general reinterpretation of South African history of recent decades • Alternative approach to expansion of European law and process of legal colonization still continuing in era of globalization
Contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Part I. Puzzles, Paradigms and Problems: 1. Four stories; 2. Legal culture, state making and colonialism; Part II. Law and Order: 3. Police and policing; 4. Criminology; 5. Prisons and penology; 6. Criminal law; 7. Criminalising political opposition; Part III. South African Common Law A: 8. Roman-Dutch law; 9. Marriage and race; 10. The legal profession; Part IV. South African Common Law B: 11. Creating the discourse: customary law and colonial rule in South Africa; 12. After Union: the segregationist tide; 13. The native appeal courts and customary law; 14. Customary law, courts and code after 1927; Part V. Law and Government: 15. Land; 16. Law and labour; 17. The new province for law and order: struggles on the racial frontier; 18. A rule of law; Part VI. Consideration: 19. Reconstructing the state: legal formalism, democracy and a post-colonial rule of law; Bibliography; Index; Index of legal cases cited.
Reviews
‘This major volume is not only a powerful and sophisticated revisionist account of South Africa’s legal culture and the construction of the Union’s legal framework in the context of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century extension of colonial rule and rapid industrialization; it is also an outstanding account of the centrality of the law in the making of the segregationist state between 1902 and 1936.’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
‘This imposing study is the culmination of more than a decade of scholarly publication on South African legal history by Martin Chanock, but readers will also fine here a reappraisal of themes that he addressed in his first book 25 years ago: the early Union state's weakness and its circumspect emergence from British imperial supervision and example. but whereas the earlier volume considered the Union externally from the perspective of Britain's plans for central and southern Africa, this book examines South African state formation from within … [an] extraordinarily ambitious book.’ African Affairs
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