The Union of South Africa, created in 1910, was an unstable state. It was the political outcome of the South African War between the Afrikaner Republics and the British empire. Though the war had ended in 1902, the issues over which it was fought were not laid to rest, and continued to call into question the legitimacy of the new state for decades. In addition to Afrikaner republicanism the state had to face a powerful new challenge from the largely British South African white labour movement, and the elemental task of maintaining white rule over the black majority. In the period after 1902 the country faced several major political revolts. In Natal a Zulu rebellion was defeated in 1906. In the Transvaal strikes by white workers led to violence which necessitated repression by military action in 1905–07, 1913–1914 and 1918, and which culminated in an attempt at revolution in 1922. In 1915 an Afrikaner republican revolt in the armed forces brought civil war to areas of the country. It is in this period of state making in a fiercely contested polity that South African legal culture and the legal system were developed.

This book locates the history of the formation of South African law in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Africa rather than, as other studies have done, in Rome or Renaissance Europe.