Accessible and engaging, this book makes three important contributions to the historiography of modern South Africa. Despite its somewhat misleading subtitle, the first three-fifths of the book is essentially about how British governments after the Anglo-Boer War failed miserably to prevent millions of Africans, Coloureds, and Indians from losing their already limited colonial franchises when the Union of South Africa was constructed by and for whites in the years from 1906 to 1910.

After defeat by British and Dominion troops in 1902, Afrikaners won the peace by compelling a guilt-ridden Britain to let them create a Union from two former Afrikaner states and two British colonies. Britain was also exceedingly anxious about Germany’s race to build battleships, and impending war.

The Union immediately subjected nearly 9 million Africans to a harsher form of white overlordship than Africans in the Cape Colony—even under Cecil Rhodes’ premiership—had ever experienced. Afrikaners from the...

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