This volume is a detailed examination of attitudes toward slavery among white settlers in South Africa from 1820 until emancipation by an act of the British Parliament in 1834.

Drawing largely on contemporary newspaper, missionary, and government reports, Watson (history, Wesleyan North Carolina Coll.) finds only individual expressions of the view that people should not be held as property; the majority of whites accepted property as more important than liberty. There is a brief analysis of the part that emancipation played in the Great Trek of Afrikaners. The final chapter compares the situation in South Africa with that in the United States in the decades preceding the Civil War. With such fairly narrow parameters, the book may be hard to follow for readers who have no background in South African history. Academic libraries may want to consider.