different. In the colonies that be-
came Canada, British settlers soon outnumbered the French Canadians. In
greater South Africa, Afrikaners have always formed at least 55 percent of
the white population.
There was another difference between the two cases. In Canada, the
Whites became overwhelmingly more numerous than the native popula-
tion at an early stage, whereas in South Africa the white population never
amounted to more than about 20 percent of the total. This disparity miti-
gated the tensions between the white communities. Although they were
expressly forbidden to own slaves, the British settlers, like the Afrikaners,
had an interest in acquiring and controlling indigenous labor. Like many
Afrikaners, too, they experienced the insecurity of life in an exposed fron-
tier zone that Africans considered to be their rightful property. The result
was that the British settlers became involved in intermittent warfare, de-
fending and expanding their territory (1834, 1846, 1850). The racism that
was part of nineteenth-century British culture became accentuated by their
experiences in their new milieu.51
In Great Britain, meanwhile, the dislocations ofthe industrial revolution
were giving rise to reform impulses that had a strong irnpact on British