William G. Martin, who teaches sociology at Binghamton University, has been much influenced by the kind of thinking developed at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at that university. The author of articles on aspects of South Africa's political economy, he now, in his most ambitious publication to date, endeavours to bring together many decades of research on South Africa and ‘the world economy’, though the sub-title of his book rightly indicates that much of it concerns South Africa's place in the Southern African region. (One wonders, however, why an admittedly striking photograph, taken by the author, of a street celebration in Harare in 1980 was used for the cover, rather than say a photograph of the street protest he tells us he was present at in Cape Town in 2003; p. 173.) It is perhaps not surprising that relatively little scholarship has tried to see South Africa in both a regional and a global context, given the difficulties involved in doing that. Martin tries to do this for more than a century, for he moves from the late 19th century to the present. As a bold attempt to show how South Africa is embedded in ‘regional and global processes of capitalist development and racial formation’ (p. 9), his book is to be welcomed.

His approach is roughly chronological. His first three chapters, which cover topics that he explored in his 1986 Ph.D dissertation, are mainly concerned with what he calls the post-World War I crisis and the radical reshaping of the South African state in the 1920s and 1930s. Then in Chapters 4 and 5, the latter entitled ‘A Mad New World’, he discusses the emergence of apartheid in the post-World War 2 world, arguing that it was accompanied by no major restructuring of South Africa's ‘position in world developmental hierarchies’ (p. 178). Chapters 6 and 7 concern the late apartheid and post-apartheid periods and again he argues for continuity: as he points out, the ending of apartheid led to no radical economic restructuring but the continuation of neo-liberal economic policies and what he calls neo-racism. These have left South Africa in what he sees as a ‘bleak’ space (p. 175), with poverty, unemployment and inequality showing no sign of being tackled by the ANC government now in power.

Martin is especially good on the interwar period and the changes it brought, say, to state enterprises, and there he goes into considerable detail and employs a wealth of primary source-material to make an original contribution to knowledge. His last chapter, by contrast, entitled ‘Looking Forward, North and East’, seems to me not only to present too negative a picture of what has happened since 1994, but becomes in places little more than a polemic against neo-liberalism. He is, nevertheless, in both that chapter and earlier ones, impressive and convincing in discussing the changing relationship between South Africa and the rest of the region of which it is part (though it is off-putting to find the Southern African Customs Union called the South African Customs Union). In my view he is much less successful in presenting a coherent picture of how South Africa's position in the world economy has changed over time. As much of his book concerns developments in the South African economy itself, it is strange that what remains the best economic history of South Africa, by the late Charles Feinstein, is not cited. One can question many of the assertions made here, for example that the deracialisation that occurred in South Africa in the 1990s was like what had `happened across decolonising Africa and Asia thirty years earlier’, which is surely not the case (p. 143). Martin's book, though densely written in places and not free of sociological jargon, is nevertheless stimulating in its concern for the long durée and the big picture, and for the way it tries to situate aspects of the history of South Africa in a global context.