The Americanization of South Africa
Date
1988-10-19
Authors
Campbell, J.
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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
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 19 October, 1998
Keywords
Africans. America. Cultural assimilation, Africa. Civilization. American influences