The extraordinary record of published scholarship by Isaac Schapera stretches from 1923 right up to date, with publications forthcoming in 1999. This bibliography covers almost two hundred titles. His main subject of interest up to 1930 was the Khoesan of South Africa. Thereafter he published on the Tswana of Botswana, beginning with studies of Kgatla society and literature, and moving into general Tswana law and society by the time of his classic Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom in 1938, commissioned by the Bechuanaland Protectorate colonial administration. In the 1940s he produced many studies of Tswana land tenure and history, including unpublished official reports. From the 1950s he definitively edited 19th century source materials on the Tswana, notably the unpublished papers of David Livingstone, and continued producing his own original studies at a prodigious rate into the 1970s. Important latter studies have been in the field of indigenous law and government, many in the Journal of African Law, founded in his honour.
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