The Americanization of South Africa

Abstract

The title of this paper comes from a 1901 book by W.T. Stead, entitled The Americanisation of the World. A British reformer and editor of the London-based Review of Reviews, Stead is perhaps best known to historians as the author of If Christ Came to Chicago, one of the era's most celebrated exposes of urban vice. Fewer may realize that Stead spent several years in the 1890s in South Africa, where he was a close confidante of Cecil John Rhodes. Exposure to South Africa played a germinal role in The Americanisation of the World, in which Stead argued that the United States was destined to displace Great Britain as the world's pre-eminent political, economic and cultural power. In contrast to contemporaries such as F. A. McKenzie, whose 1902 book, The American Invaders, urged action against the "armies of American entrepreneurs conquering British markets," Stead saw the United States' global expansion as irresistable. The choice for Britain's rulers was whether to defy the inevitable and thereby to consign themselves to global irrelevance, or to accept the majority of their one-time colony, forging an Anglo- American commonwealth that would secure for all time the primacy of the virile Anglo-Saxon race