United States Relations with South Africa: A Critical Overview from the Colonial Period to the Present

Description

A comprehensive but critical overview, from the colonial period to the present, of both official and non-official political, economic, and cultural relations between the United States and South Africa. See below for more details.

Description

Synopsis-- This book is a critical overview of relations between these two countries from the late seventeenth century to the present. Unprecedented in its scope - and supported by substantive and detailed notes, together with an extensive bibliography, chronology, glossary, and appendices - the book distinguishes itself from extant works in a number of other ways. Set against the backdrop of a wider interdisciplinary exploration of both ideational and structural issues of historical context, it not only gives attention to the importance of contributions from nonofficial actors in shaping official relations, but also considers the impact of the geo-political location of South Africa within southern Africa, where the presence of other nations - particularly Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe - looms large. Methodologically written from the perspectives of both traditional narrative history and Khaldunian interpretive historical analysis, the book consequently sits at the interdisciplinary interstice of political economy and sociology, where the aim is to advance our understanding of the Braudelian interconnectedness of world history as an important diachronic determinant of the diplomacy of foreign relations. Written for both scholars and policy analysts, this book's examination of the agency of the marginalized should also be of interest to activists and the reading public.

First Sentence

Few are aware that the earliest contacts between the parts of the world that we today recognize as the United States and South Africa go nearly as far back as the very beginning of their inception as permanent European colonial intrusions on two separate continents, but situated diagonally across each other on the opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Subjects