In this book, William Kelleher Storey shows that guns and discussions about guns during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were fundamentally important to the establishment of racial discrimination in South Africa. Relying mainly on materials held in archives and libraries in Britain and South Africa, Storey explains the workings of the gun trade and the technological development of the firearms. He relates the history of firearms to ecological, political, and social changes, showing that there is a close relationship between technology and politics in South Africa.

Table of Contents

1. Guns in colonial South African history; 2. Early colonialism and guns at the Cape up to 1795; 3. Guns, conflict, and political culture along the Eastern Frontier, 1795-1840; 4. Hunting, warfare, and guns along the Northern Frontier, 1795-1868; 5. Capitalism, race, and breechloaders, 1840-1880; 6. Guns and the Langalibalele Affair, 1873-1875; 7. Guns and confederation, 1875-1876; 8. Risk, skill, and citizenship in the Eastern Cape, 1876-1879.

Author Biography

William Kelleher Storey is associate professor of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (1997), Writing History: A Guide for Students (1998; 2nd Ed. 2003; 3rd Ed. 2008), which he developed when teaching in Harvard's Expository Writing Program. He has received a research and writing fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Abbott Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for his article in Technology and Culture. In 2006, he received the Teacher's Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council.