The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South [Book Review]

In this provocative, well-written extended essay, based on unusually keen reflections on the major secondary literatures on race relations in South Africa and in the southern United States, rather than on an independent examination of primary documents, British Empire specialist John W. Cell takes issue with several recent interpretations, including that of George M., Fredrickson's White Supremacy (1981). Racial segregation in both countries, Cell argues, was not primarily an outgrowth of their slave or frontier or agricultural histories. Rather, their self-conscious, formalized systems of discriminatory racial separation crystallized relatively suddenly after 1890 in the United States and after 1905 in South Africa; flourished in the "modern" urban and industrial, rather than the "traditional" agrarian, sector of society; were imposed by political, not social or economic, means; represented responses to political or economic threats or potential threats by persons of color, rather than mere legalizations of their already deprived socioeconomic status; and were fostered largely by white moderates, not extremists