Crime, class and nationalism: The criminology of Jacob de Villiers Roos, 1869–1918

Abstract

The article traces the foundation of the modern penal system of South Africa to the origins of Union and the concerns of a class of men whose political heritage was the ideology of a modernising agrarian and manufacturing class allied to British imperialism. By examining the history of Jacob de Villiers Roos, architect of the Union Government's penal legislation, the article shows what this ideology, a white ‘South Africanism’ meant politically and economically. Its expression in the development of a pro‐state, consensus criminology and a criminal law broadly fashioned along British lines was not, however, a direct reflection of the political and economic interests of Roos and his class; these concerns were mediated through the application of a capitalist, secular rationality whose primary object was elimination of disorder and backwardness, symbolic of the ideological way in which an essentially political project was conceived.