The interconnection between landscapes and socio-political spheres has been outlined by proponents of contemporary critical theory. As Jeremy Foster, drawing on the work of Foucault and Said, states: ‘… political and economic ideologies are inextricably intertwined with the way individuals and collectivities appropriate space and, indeed, are integral to the radical transformation of received notions of space and place in the modern era’ (p. 3). As such, Washed with the Sun approaches South Africa as a socially constructed identity. By adopting an historical method, Foster charts the country's relationship with its imperialist past, and argues that there can be no more culturally powerful form of identity than that ‘associated with living in a geographically bounded place or territory’ (p. 14). He sees South Africa emerging as a state before it was fully a nation. Contestation between the British and the Boer Republics, which resulted in war, represented another change of identity: ‘The conflict transformed the European geographical imagination of the region and helped bring about the politicisation of the relationship between people and place’ (p. 19).

Economics and wealth also played a role in the development of cities. Johannesburg, for example, was transformed from a mining camp into an urban development. In 1906, just twenty years after the discovery of gold, Johannesburg was a town of 100,000 people, and covered 75 square miles. The growth of the region is brought alive by the inclusion of Grocott and Sherry's plan of Johannesburg and its suburbs. The inclusion of paintings and photographs, some of which are taken by the author, together with images of murals painted by George Smithard, especially for Pretoria Railway Station, is immensely evocative of historical periods. A visual depiction of Johannesburg Station concourse, which was published in the Illustrated London News in 1934, might have been of a European city, if one did not know otherwise. Of course, the nature of colonialism was to project buildings and art forms onto dominions. But the power of the images contained in Washed with the Sun rests in the impressively wild terrain of the country as a whole, which asserts that no force could entirely tame this magnificent land.

Foster sees the predominance of an imperialist perception of the environment as preparing ‘the way for South Africanism, and South Africanism in turn prepared the way for the white nationalist landscape subjectivity. Black and white photographs that represented the entire veld as simultaneously modern and archaic posited a territory that was a transitional object for Afrikanerdom's modern, rational appeals to historicist ideas of racial purity’ (p. 261). Washed with the Sun is an important work: intellectually based, visually stunning and lucidly written. It should be consulted by all those who study South Africa: sociologists and critical theorists; political scientists and historians; geographers and social scientists alike. There is much to see and read.