The Anglo-Boer War pitted racial naturalism against racial historicism

Evidence

The Anglo-Boer War was fought over control: of the source of gold; over returns on capital investment; over inserting the region into globalizing modernity; over laboring conditions, skilling and deskilling; and over competing conceptions of the racial. The boers and their political representation stood for the ancien régime of racial naturalism, inherent inferiority, and extended enslaveability. British political representatives and Randlords saw themselves by contrast as committed to modernization and industrializing progress, post-emancipation racial historicism, and market forces of demand and supply for educable free labor. The latter was seen as the surest way to depress wages even of skilled labor given the potential abundance of workers. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1463

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the distinction between racial naturalism (fixed inherent inferiority) and racial historicism (educable but still inferior populations) as competing racial regimes.
• ADDENDUM: The modernization-versus-racial-naturalism frame clarifies the economic logic behind segregationist labor policy raised in earlier chapters on the South African-US mirror.