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This chapter reviews income and welfare measurement and examines the central topics of assets and sustainability with the evaluation of key conceptual and theoretical literature. It also outlines the methods of asset accounting and presents selected empirical results from ‘greening’ the national accounts. Linkages to policy are explored, followed by broad conclusions on some basic questions: To what extent has the promise of environmental accounting been realized? Which approach has the greatest policy significance? And where is environmental accounting likely to be most useful? Finally, it studies the recent empirical results from Southern Africa and explores policy linkage with concluding remarks.

Between the 1860s and the First World War, all the indigenous inhabitants of southern and central Africa were brought under British rule. Historical writing on southern Africa, including what later became British Central Africa, began at the same time. Most English-speaking historians writing in South Africa after the First World War were certain that colonial expansion and white settlement were necessary for the economic uplift and civilizing of Africans, but highly critical of the racial policies being espoused by Afrikaner nationalists. With the British Empire virtually coming to an end in the 1950s and 1960s, and the transition to a multiracial majority-ruled Commonwealth receiving its greatest challenge in apartheid South Africa and federating Central Africa, Thompson’s contemporaries focused on the historical roles of white settlers and Imperial officials in bringing about division when there should have been unity. The writing of history has not flourished on campuses in the independent states, and the bulk of work done has been pursued in the universities of Europe and North America. In such circumstances, debate about the legacy of Empire will be as intense in the future as it has been in the past.

Key contemporary mechanisms of distribution are routed through the ‘social assistance’ programmes provided by states. While we still often think of such programmes on the model of the well-known ‘welfare states’ of the global North, new forms of state and international transfers to the poor (in Africa and elsewhere in the global South) suggest a need to rethink the question of social assistance from a less Eurocentric perspective. With a special focus on southern Africa, this chapter reviews the meaning of ‘social assistance’ in a region where the domain of ‘the social’ was never securely established in the first place. It reflects on the possibility that new rationalities and techniques of social assistance may be calling into question the assumed dependence of social service provision on traditional forms of population registration and documentation.

The US and the Western European countries certainly had their differences over various European questions, but all debate took place against the background of a Soviet threat that disturbed the entire ‘free world’ and a NATO framework that had been established to deal with this threat. However, disagreements over out‐of‐area disputes (i.e. disputes outside the area covered by core Article 5 of the NATO treaty) between the US and many Western European countries were even more frequent and the common framework much weaker. At the beginning of the post‐war period, the US definitely saw itself as an anti‐colonial power, and its strong anti‐colonial views spurred progress towards independence not only for India and other British colonial territories, but also for those of other European colonies. The different sections of this chapter look at the changing nature of America's colonial policy, particularly in the face of prospects that communists might take control of a former European territory, and at its increasing role in other out‐of‐area questions, over the period 1945–1975. The areas discussed are East Asia (French Indo‐china, China, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars), the Middle East, and Southern Africa and Cuba. In addition a whole separate section is devoted to the Vietnam conflict, and another to the various disputes that led the Nixon administration to pronounce 1973 the ‘Year of Europe’ in an effort to bring the US and Western Europe close after a period of dispute that had involved, in particular, American support to Israel.

This chapter tries to make a case for the defense and looks at everything that can be argued against the identification of African religion with the microcosmic and of mission Christianity with the macrocosmic. It then turns to the key question of literacy, arguing that there was no necessary connection between its introduction into much of southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and conversion to Christianity, even though there was an actual connection. The generalizing potentialities of literacy have become available to the spokespersons of African religion. The ways in which mission Christianity was much less macrocosmic than the conventional model supposes are explored. It is noted that much of the continuing history of the religion in southern Africa, whether of Christianity or of African religion, lies in the working out of “this dialectic between the local and the central”.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the severe AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa. The region accounts for over one third of all people living with HIV in the world, and the nine countries with the highest prevalence in the world are in Southern Africa. Given these sobering statistics, as well as a continued high spread of HIV, the situation can be characterized as “hyperendemic.” The remainder of the chapter covers the vulnerability of women to HIV in Southern Africa; the drivers of hyperendemic HIV; the impact of apartheid and its ramifications on current sexual behavior, and hence the spread of HIV; the role of government policy in curbing HIV infection and death; and progress in the AIDS response in Southern Africa.

Health is an outcome of the circumstances of people's lives, the communities and environments in which people live and work, the nature of the social relationships, goods, and services people encounter, and the choices people make around these conditions. This chapter identifies these influences over the distribution of health and well-being across population groups, countries, and regions. It outlines models used to summarize and explain the social determinants of health. Further, it considers the types of interventions and actions that must be taken outside the health sector to improve the distribution of health and well-being, and what that implies for the role of the health sector within the wider health system. In some aspects, the chapter draws on the learning from the work in the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission of the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), and particularly the Health Systems Knowledge network of the CSDH, and the learning and analysis from work in the Regional Network for Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa (EQUINET).

This chapter begins with a discussion of Scottish involvement in the British Empire. It then considers whether there was a distinct Scottish identity which was maintained, promoted or even developed at the so-called periphery of empire, and argues that, for good or ill, Scots contributed more powerfully than their numbers would suggest to the processes of westernisation and modernisation in southern Africa. Through their linguistic and ethnographic activities, particularly in the context of the frontier missions, they had a considerable influence upon attitudes to African peoples, to the classic nineteenth-century activity, derived from the Enlightenment, of creating taxonomies and stereotypes for humans as much as for the phenomena of the natural world. Such activities led to strong, though inevitably diverse, ideas about the frontier, African administration, labour policy and much else.

Scots did not wait until the first British capture of the Cape in 1795 to be engaged in the establishment of a white community at the southern tip of Africa. In this respect, they were following a long-standing propensity to be involved in commercial ventures throughout the North Sea and Baltic regions. Thus, when such ventures reached out into the South Atlantic, they were soon there too. This chapter discusses prominent Scots in the British occupations, the Moodie settlement and the 1820 settlement.

This chapter discusses the military leadership at the close of the nineteenth century in southern Africa. Here, the parallel cases are the British army's defeat at Isandhlwana at the hands of the Zulu army, and the repulse of the latter by the former, within twenty-four hours, at Rorke's Drift. Since the armies were identical and the tactics for both sides had been firmly established by their respective senior leaders, this chapter examines why the first battle went so badly for the British but the second so badly for the Zulus. It provides an outline of the background to the Anglo–Zulu conflict.

This book is concerned with institutions carrying the designation ngoma and related terms. By entering African religious and therapeutic expression through its own language, some important underlying, and possibly historic, commonalities and connections are identified. This can also help in the establishing of the basis for variants and transformations more intelligibly. A review of some of the scholarship relating to healing in community settings in Central and Southern Africa is presented. In addition, an extensive field survey of ngoma manifestations in four settings of Sub-Saharan Africa where the literature suggested it occurred is provided. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the other chapters included in this book.

This chapter examines the various ways in which Scots declared their identity in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Caledonian Societies emerged throughout southern Africa. The totemic days of the Scottish calendar were widely celebrated. Highland games were instituted as major sporting and cultural events, matching their counterparts in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.