This article provides a succinct overview of the impact of the First World War on the economy and the home front of the Union of South Africa, and considers the main ways in which these domestic sectors responded to the disruptions and strains of these years. Its central aim is to illuminate the very patchy and ambivalent manner in which South Africa’s economy and society intersected with the wartime European imperial world and reacted to its intrusive effects. Although its distant geographical location enabled this British Dominion to escape the devastating material effects of warfare in other African regions, the pre-war conditions of mining, manufacturing and agriculture were substantially re-shaped by wartime forces. The complex mix of burdens and opportunities associated with this was spread highly unevenly across South Africa’s population of around six million white and black inhabitants. What it all amounted to was a decisive transition towards the formation of an increasingly diversified and modernising post1918 segregationist colonial state.