As part of Routledge's ‘Making of the Contemporary World’ series, this work seeks to offer ‘compact, indispensable introductions for students studying the modern world’. Compact, for sure: not many scholars would attempt a synthesis of South Africa, let alone southern Africa, in so few pages. The body of the text, adorned with several figures, stands at a mere 140 pages. For students, this book will provide a concise narrative of how the region arrived at its current geopolitical position. Specialists who intimately know the subtleties of southern African history, however, may read the book through voyeuristic lenses: how will this author possibly condense so much history without sacrificing content or care for historical complexities?

Like all syntheses, Farley's Southern Africa does not escape this scholastic gauntlet unscathed. There are some infelicitous phrasings, including the ubiquitous ‘tribe’. Important and controversial historical moments like the mfecane are not well explained and adhere to standard narratives. And the author begins the study with the arrival of Europeans and makes no mention of African history before the encounter. These last two omissions leave past historiographical missteps uncorrected, and students (the target audience) are not likely to know the difference. Considering its length restrictions, perhaps this book could have been framed better by starting at the turn of the twentieth century.

Farley structures his narrative around what he sees as the watershed historical moment in southern Africa – Portugal's exit from the continent in the 1970s – ‘for it set in train a pattern of events which were eventually to undermine the very foundations of White rule and create a series of polities very different from those which had gone before’ (p. 2). More controversially, the author uses this moment to define the region itself (‘those countries which achieved majority rule after … the collapse of Portugal's African empire’), which excludes Zambia and Malawi, and yet he makes an exception for Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland. Squabbles over the region's definition aside, this is problematic because the author frames his study to fit his historical thesis – one that, on its own, is contentious and unproven.

Even with these detractions, the author does provide a useful overview for students unfamiliar with the region. The book's four main chapters on the social and economic dimensions, political history, security and foreign policy are practical and informative, if a bit imbalanced. Key topics of regional relevance are covered, like HIV/AIDS, foreign dependency and multinational corporations, immigration, and women's rights. Given the structure of the narrative, this book would be best placed in undergraduate courses in international relations. In more advanced classes, the weaknesses of this book will undermine its strengths.