Description

Once an international pariah, South Africa has emerged as a respected and influential African state, projecting its economic and political power across the continent. South Africa and the World Economy: Remaking Race, State, and Region chronicles the volatile history of this resurgence, from the nation's rise as an industrialized, white state and subsequent decline as a newly underdeveloped country to its current standing as a leading member of the Global South. Contrasting with much of the latest scholarship, which examines South Africa as a discrete national case, this volume places the country in the global social system, analyzing its relationships with the colonial powers and white settlers of the early twentieth century, the costs of the neoliberal alliances with the North, and the more recent challenges from the East. This approach offers a bold reinterpretation of South Africa's developmental successes and failures over the last century -- as well as clear yet contentious lessons for the present.

William G. Martin is chair of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, coeditor of From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, and coauthor of Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1760-2005.