William Mark Freund (6 July 1944 – 17 August 2020) was an American academic historian who was particularly known as an authority on the economic and labour history of Africa with a particular focus on South Africa. He taught for much of his career at the University of Natal and its successor institution, the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is best known for The Making of Contemporary Africa (1984) which was widely praised as a survey of scholarship on the social and economic history of Africa in the colonial and post-colonial eras. A self-described "materialist", he wrote widely on African labour and urban history subjects.