Accounts of South African history and politics have been much influenced by what might be termed the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history. As a model for the historical understanding of modern Afrikaner nationalism and of the ideology of apartheid it has proved persuasive to historians and social scientists alike. In outline, it amounts to the view that the “seventeenth-century Calvinism” which the Afrikaner founding fathers derived from their countries of origin became fixed in the isolated frontier conditions of trekboer society and survived for generations in the form of a kind of “primitive Calvinism”; that in the first part of the nineteenth century, this gave rise to a nascent chosen people ideology among early Afrikaners, which provided much of the motivation for, as well as the self-understanding of, that central event in Afrikaner history, the Great Trek, while simultaneously serving to legitimate the conquest and subordination of indigenous peoples; and that, mediated in this way, an authentic tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism thus constitutes the root source of modern Afrikaner nationalism and the ideology of apartheid. In fact, very little of this purported historical explanation will stand up to rigorous critical scrutiny: in vain will one look for hard evidence, either in the primary sources of early Afrikaner political thinking or in the contemporary secondary literature, of a set of popular beliefs that might be recognised as “primitive Calvinism” or as an ideology of a chosen people with a national mission.

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.

The idea that firearms promote centralized government has a venerable pedigree in European historiography. Friedrich Engels observed that the new weapons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrought substantial changes on class relations as merchants allied themselves with monarchs to wrest control of firearms from nobles and to reap the benefits of emerging mercantile states. The history of firearms thus conceived highlights the cultural content of technology and may provide more than a barren chronicle of destructive tools, as illustrated in J. U. Nef's classic study of technology and war and, in the same tradition, William McNeill's recent synthesis outlining the manner in which European culture framed innovations in military technology

The origins and first uses of money have long been topics of interest to scholars. Although economists today still repeat Adam Smith's argument that money was created to eliminate barter, researchers with an extensive knowledge of archaic and primitive cultures have shown that money was often required for reasons other than the indirect exchange of goods. Irish evidence gives a European example of primitive money used to pay fines and to meet social obligations; what made the money valuable was that it enabled its recipients to perform these functions. Money was not used to facilitate the indirect exchange of goods.

Marx's well-known assertion that the basic form of all phenomena in the East was the absence of private property in land is part of an old tradition of Western thought which is still alive. But if the conclusions are similar, they follow from different arguments, varying from author to author, country to country, and, of course, over time as historical knowledge grows.