The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire ― The Making of Colonial Racial Order in the American Ohio Country and the South African Eastern Cape, 1770s-1850s

This work by Strobel (history, U. of Massachusetts at Lowell) is a comparative history of colonial encroachment on the American frontier of Ohio Country (which includes parts of present day western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan) and the South African Eastern Cape region that is centrally concerned with the emergence and transformation of the regions' colonial racial orders--a colonial racial order being "a system where a white settler state imposed its control over indigenous populations, a power relationship that over time increasingly manifested itself through "racial differentiation."" He argues that the construction of these racial orders of racism, racial separation, and decentralized power and authority, while never uncontested, served as imperial testing grounds foreshadowing the establishment of a global order of racial supremacy and empire that was to spread around the world through the 19th and 20th centuries. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)