THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, volume 1, from early times to 1885

467 pp., maps, paperback, Reprint, New York, (2010) 2012

This volume, the first of two, presents a detailed overview of South Africa's past, from the Early Stone Age to the eve of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. The different chapters are written by ten leading historians of the country: Carolyn Hamilton, Robert Ross, John Parkington, Simon Hall, John Wright, Martin Legassick, Norman Etherington, Patrick Harries, Bernard Mbenga and Paul Landau.

Carolyn Hamilton is NRF Research Professor in Archive and Public Culture, University of Cape Town. She is the author of Terrific Majesty: The powers of Shaka Zulu and the limits of historical invention and co-editor of Babel Unbound, rage, reason and thinking public life and Uncertain Curature, in and out of the archive.

Bernard Mbenga is Extraordinary Professor in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at North West University. He is co-author (with Andrew Manson) of Land, Chiefs, Mining, South Africa's North West Province since 1840 and co-author and co-editor (with Hermann Giliomee) of New History of South Africa.

Robert Ross is Professor of History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His books include A Concise History of South Africa, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony: a tragedy of manners and The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: the Kat River settlement, 1829-1856.