18th Century Cape of Good Hope

The retail of alcohol was so central to the economy and society of the Cape of Good Hope during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it earned the nickname “tavern of two oceans”. This retail business was organised on the so-called
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.

This article explores the treatment of unmarried mothers by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) at the Cape of Good Hope during the VOC period (1652-1795) in the belief that by concentrating on this exceptional group of people much is revealed of normative practices. For most of its history at the Cape during this period the DRC was not overly biased against unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children, continuing to baptise such children and never acting against the mothers. This changed in the 1780s when the Church started to deny access to its two sacraments – baptism and Holy Communion – to illegitimate children and their parents. Through a detailed exploration of baptismal petitions for illegitimate children and censure cases involving unmarried mothers, this article reveals the growing obsession with regulating the conduct of single women. It is suggested that the origins of this movement lie both in local Cape developments, viz. the socio-economic upheavals caused by the Revolutionary wars, and – perhaps primarily – in changing attitudes towards motherhood created by Enlightenment ideas and Pietistic religion. At the Cape this new ideology was disseminated by the DRC minister H.R. van Lier who used existing Reformed dogma about the sacraments to regulate the morals of unmarried mothers.

This work overviews complete lists and cartographic as well as statistical analysis of the lost ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during 17th and 18th century. The various possibilities of eventual future archaeological research of the minimum 734 ships are also examined.

Diese Arbeit ist eine Zusammentragung aller Schiffsverluste der Niederländischen Ostindienkompanie (und ihrer Vorgängergesellschaften) während des 17. und 18. Jhd. und beinhaltet kartographische sowie statistische Analysen zu den archäologischen Erkenntnissen und Möglichkeiten der mindestens 734 Schiffe.

Dit werk omvat de volledige lijsten en kartering alsmede statistische analyses van de schip verliezen van de Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) tijdens de 17e en 18e eeuw. De vele mogelijkheden van toekomst archeologisch onderzoek van deze 734 schepen zijn ook behandelt.


[* Sensible data is blackened * Sensible Daten sind geschwärzt * Vertrouwelijke gegevens zijn zwart *]

Why is Southern Africa so rarely covered in volumes on the Atlantic World? Although, in the wake of the Second World War, some pioneer historians and advocates of a unified analysis of the four continents bordering the Atlantic considered southern Africa to be part of this ‘community’,  this was not borne out in the subsequent developments of Atlantic history which has been little concerned with the deep southern part of the ocean. Thus, a major new synthesis such as Thomas Benjamin’s “The Atlantic World” contains no discussion of Africa south of Angola and hardly mentions the Cape of Good Hope.  This state of affairs is partly related to the fact that early practitioners of Atlantic history viewed the ocean as ‘a basin around which a new civilization slowly formed’.  But this basin was not completely bounded or closed-off: the original purpose for crossing the Atlantic was to connect Europe with the East Indies, and this the passage around the Cape of Good Hope in the south Atlantic continued to provide throughout the period covered by this volume (1450-1850), as is increasingly being acknowledged.  But perhaps the main reason for this state of affairs in the historiography of the Atlantic is the result of the isolation of South African historians until the 1980s and their own inward-looking habits and practices.  For a long time historians of the colonial Cape tended to look to the hinterland and the interior of Africa, forgetting that the inhabitants of the Cape during this period were mostly ocean-oriented. This is what will be described in this chapter, which also affords one the opportunity to rethink the traditionally conceived notion of the Atlantic World as being bounded and closed-off. Serving as it did as a pivot between two oceans; the existence of a colonial society at the Cape of Good Hope made possible the development of a globalised, unified oceanic world by the nineteenth century.

Two of the many consequences of the expansion of Europe during the early modern period were the spread of Christianity to areas outside of the Mediterranean world and the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people to work in European colonies. How did the institution of slavery impact on the practice of Christianity in a Protestant colony such as the Cape of Good Hope? This article investigates this question with a study of how the larger context of church practice and dogma influence the reality of a slave-owning society in the district of Stellenbosch during the VOC era. It shows that although a few slave individuals were baptised in the Dutch Reformed Church, only a very small number of them became actual members of the Church. This, it is argued, was related to the inherent contradiction between the requirements of the Church - that its members be knowledgeable and led moral lives - and the reality of a slave's existence - which allowed little opportunity for free time and study and made relationships between men and women technically illegal by not allowing formal marriage. It is for these reasons that so few slaves could be Christians - at least in the eyes of the official Church - in eighteenth-century Stellenbosch.

Contrary to popular opinion, the recent interest in the role of slaves and
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.

"Slaves, Khoikhoi and Dutch Pidgins at the Cape, c. 1590-1720: A Critical Investigation of the Socio-Historical Foundations of the Convergence Theory for the Genesis of Afrikaans"

This study is a critical investigation of the socio-historical foundations of the Convergence Theory for the genesis of Afrikaans, as developed by Hans den Besten. It is done within the theoretical framework of the study of Creole genesis as suggested by the gradualists (John Singler, Jacques Arends and Philip Baker) and the Complementary Theory of Salikoko Mufwene. These approaches stress the use of socio-historical material. In line with this the work of historians on aspects of the early Cape society, c. 1590-1720, especially the number, distribution, origins and mutual contact between the three main groups at the Cape, viz. the Khoikhoi, slaves and European settlers, is used. Material from primary sources such as travel descriptions is also used. This historical material is used to test and nuance the Convergence Theory. It is shown that the central proposition of this theory, viz. the existence of a stable pidgin among the Khoikhoi and slaves in the period before 1713, is not tenable. Moreover, many of the details of the theory still offers a useful framework for the study of the history of Afrikaans and that the rejection of a stable pidgin does not dispute the important role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans.
The study consists of five main chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the development of Afrikaans historical linguistics and shows how two basic views developed about the role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the development of the gradualist hypotheses and Mufwene’s Complementary Theory against the background of theories of Creole genesis. The methodology, techniques and examples of the work of these theorists are stressed. Chapter 4 gives an overview of what the Convergence Theory entails and points out the problems which can be levelled against it from a socio-historical viewpoint. Chapter 5 is a detailed exposition of those historical aspects of Cape society, c. 1590-1720, that are of importance in the evaluation of the Convergence Theory. The demography of the Cape and mutual contact between the Khoikhoi, Europeans and slaves are emphasised, although other factors, such as the rise of the free-black community and the role of education, are also considered. The analysis is supported by quantitative data of historians on the number and origins of slaves (Addendum 8). Chapter 6 considers the criticisms that were levelled against the Convergence Theory in the light of the historical data presented in chapter 5. It is shown which aspects of the theory are unacceptable and which should be nuanced. Finally a short comparative perspective with two other Dutch colonies is given to show how decisive a role Khoikhoi and slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans. Apart from quantitative data, the Addendum also contains a corpus of utterances in any form of Dutch or English by Khoikhoi and slaves in the period 1590-1720 which were noted in the course of this research project.

The chapter opens with an introductory section discussing the various opinions of 17th and 18th century Dutch legal authorities on the different types of honour for women and men, and the ways in which its loss could be compensated. This leads me to the central question of the paper: how were the customs, manners and laws inherited from the Dutch Republic changed and adapted in a different socio-economic context, in particular a colonial situation marked by huge differences in power between the free and unfree, and by the formation of new identities and status groups, increasingly marked by an awareness of race? How did men and women of European descent at the Cape view their own honour with regards to sexual morals, how did others view their actions, and how did these attitudes change over time in a setting which became socially and politically more complex?
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.

"The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established their settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 in order to refresh passing trade ships with fresh water, vegetables, and meat in hopes of lessening disease and death during the long voyages around the tip of Africa between Europe and the Far East. The great demand for meat provided an impetus for Dutch-Khoehoe interactions which ultimately drained the Khoekhoe of their wealth, land, and identity. Currently, with the exception of the terrestrial faunal from Oudepost I (Cruz-Uribe and Schrire 1991), historic period faunal analyses at the Cape have been very localized, superficially descriptive, and taphonomically flawed, which has led to very little understanding of the overall colonial meat market and included some implausible interpretations.

This thesis takes into account contextual evidence, applies zooarchaeological methodology, and incorporates actualistically-based research into taphonomic traces on bone surfaces and to better reconstruct the originally deposited samples. The investigation of the VOC’s meat industry that was emplaced at the Cape is carried out through the investigation of five faunal samples including three sites from the Castle of Good Hope; the Moat, the Granary (F2), and Donkergat (DKG); Elsenburg; and the Dump from Oudespost I. The systemic approach provides information about livestock production, slaughter, and consumption at the Cape with information about large scale slaughter for local markets or trade ship provisioning. This thesis describes the transplanted European husbandry practices as the VOC overcame initial hardships of meeting high meat demands to become the dominant power across the landscape."

"The Cape protest movement of the 1770s/1780s has for long been seen in simple terms of a struggle of burghers against colonial government. But the community of Cape Town at the end of the 18th century consisted of a wide variety of people with different backgrounds. The burgher protest movement was not a movement of all burghers against the Company, but of a certain faction of burghers against other factions with closer ties to the administration.
This chapter examines the burghers in the protest movement, both as individuals and as a group, in terms of their numbers; status, occupation, class position and family and business relations and in comparison with the wider burgher population of the town. It will also examine the close-knit urban elite consisting of prominent burghers and Company officials, and a small group of wealthy landowners in the direct vicinity of Cape Town, who did not associate with the protesters. A picture emerges of an involved network of personal and material relationships between burghers and Company officials which dominated political life and copied the Dutch urban faction system."

In Cape Town under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (1652-1795) free trade was severely restricted. During its founding years, the free inhabitants all shared the same socio-economic background, yet three to four generations later a stratified society had developed with a clearly identifiable elite. Partly this was the result of some burghers amassing large capital resources through utilising the possibilities afforded by the lucrative alcohol trade. A large measure of this success was due to the exploitation of an intricate network of connections built up through kinship and social capital. This article concentrates on the cultural aspects of the lives of the most successful alcohol entrepreneurs, taking a multi-generational view. If they were the financial elite of Cape Town, were they also the social and cultural ones? How did they view themselves and how were they viewed by others? In order to answer these questions the article uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic capital’, arguing that it operated in tandem with economic and social capital. Two broad aspects of the cultural lives of wealthy alcohol traders are addressed. Firstly, the article discusses their consumption patterns and the use of material culture in showcasing their wealth such as choice of address, the use of slaves and carriages, and the display of jewellery, paintings and curtains. Secondly, it investigates to what extent these people’s status was acknowledged by others – both in concrete terms by being elected to major civic functions (especially in the burgher militia) and in symbolic terms, notably their role in formal processions through the town.

Many mothers in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cape Town produced prenuptial or out-of-wedlock children. Yet little is known of either the mothers or their bastards; due not to a lack of sources, but to the neglect gender and family history has suffered in colonial South African historiography. Because of this neglect, I propose to address in this exploratory article some of the issues raised by illegitimacy and to present some of the sources that are available to historians. This I do by concentrating on the legal framework: illegitimacy is first of all a legal and not primarily a moral category. Who were the parents of illegitimate children and what sort of sexual relations resulted in their birth? How did the specific social conditions at the Cape impact on the different types of relations that existed between men and women? And, above all, how was this regulated – what was the impact of family law on the relations between parents and the status of their children? A further question – albeit one which can be dealt with less fully due to the restrictions of the archival record – is what happened to such children. Were they allowed to live? What provisions were made for them, and what was the legal impact of their status as bastards? In spite of the legal focus of this article, it must be remembered that the way in which the law was interpreted and enforced at the Cape of Good Hope was influenced by the social contexts of both early modern Europe and the society which developed here during the Dutch period.

This article seeks to emphasise the notion that the Cape settlement of the
VOC period needs to be studied within the context of the Dutch world and
not in isolation. In recent research, empires are seen more as a collection of
nodes than structures of a centre with peripheries. Each node can be part of
several networks, which contribute to the shaping of that node. When applied
to the Cape settlement this concept makes a valuable contribution to our
understanding of Cape society and its residents. The Cape was a complex society
in which several different groups lived together. Each of these experienced
their environment in another manner influenced by the networks they were
part of, and each of these made their own contribution to the shaping of
the Cape settlement. This article focuses on the burgher group and especially
those burghers from the middle and upper layers. These burghers were the
ones who were mostly exposed to the many connections of the Cape with the
Netherlands through for instance religion, education, enterprise, the justice
system, and travel. As a result, they came to regard themselves as burghers of
the United Netherlands who were entitled to all the rights and privileges of
that status. The VOC administration did not agree and argued that all were
subjects of the Company. The position on both sides of the conflict needs to
be referenced to the larger framework of the Dutch world. As such this clash is
a practical example of how the Cape during the Dutch period can only really
be understood as part of a larger context which shows that the Cape, although
perhaps unique and atypical, ultimately was part and parcel of the Dutch
trading empire and its networks.

This article uses the career of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen at the Cape between 1702 and 1741 to illustrate the mechanisms free burghers could use to create wealth in an economically restrictive environment. By making use of the concept of entrepreneurship and its attendant issues, the article describes Eksteenʼs rise to fortune and prestige through his exploitation of a combination of economic opportunities afforded by Cape Townʼs position as a port servicing passing ships. Crucial to Eksteenʼs later success was his successful use of the opportunities provided by the monopolistic alcohol retail market at the Cape. Eksteenʼs initial success in this arena provided him with a capital base to pursue other opportunities in agriculture, fishing and meat provision, making him the wealthiest man at the Cape by the 1730s. The article also illustrates how Eksteenʼs upward mobility was linked to his use of social capital and the cultivation of large social networks through kinship. It demonstrates, furthermore, that economic success was wound up with social power and prestige. In using the biography of Eksteen, the article argues for the importance of economic history in the study of the early modern Cape, but calls also for a study which links economic developments with social and cultural ones through a focus on individual entrepreneurs. Shown, too, is the fact that the existing conception of the rise of a Cape gentry in the eighteenth century needs to be revised to take into account the role of entrepreneurship, the urban foundations of wealth creation, as well as the role of the free black community in this process.

A hallmark of colonisation was extensive social reconfiguration, leading to the development of local elites which differed from the metropolitan and indigenous patterns. Historians of the Cape of Good Hope during the VOC era have identified the development of a local elite during the eighteenth century. The Cape gentry, consisting of grain and wine farmers in the hinterland of Cape Town, consolidated their power and influence over several generations through capital accumulation in the form of land and slaves, and through contracting endogamous marriages. This article contributes to this scholarship by adding a missing dimension: urban entrepreneurs in the form of the alcohol pachters (lease-holders). It traces how kinship, entrepreneurship and social capital were used by these people to gain economic advancement, and how the use of these factors changed over time. The article argues that the 1770s present a change-over from an earlier era when alcohol entrepreneurs were largely immigrant-based and used their cultural identities to their  advantage, to a system where the urban and rural elites increasingly contracted business and social alliances. As such this study argues that the foundations of the Cape gentry lay in more than the accumulation of land and slaves. The  entrepreneurial activities of alcohol pachters in Cape Town and their increasing alliances with the rural elite played an important role in creating an intricate network of wealthy and influential elite families at the Cape of Good Hope by the end of the eighteenth century.

During the past three decades, historians of the Cape Colony during the period of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule have transformed our view of the role of slavery. Slavery has moved from an issue of marginal importance to one which is now considered central to the establishment and growth of a colonial society in South Africa. Most of this work, however, focused on the agrarian areas of the colony, and there has, until recently, been relatively little attempt to plumb the uniqueness of the experience of slaves and free blacks in VOC Cape Town. This topic deserves interest because of the cosmopolitan nature of the urban environment and its links with the wider world of the Indian Ocean. This article is a synthesis of the most important recent research on the experience of slaves and free blacks in Cape Town. It shows that although there is general agreement about the origins and development of slavery, its demographic nature and its economic significance, Cape historians have yet to fully utilise the available sources to trace the cultural and social history of urban slavery. This article indicates some of the areas – such as family history, the role of religion, material culture and the creation of meaning – which are in need of research, and suggests some of the sources and approaches which could be utilised.

"Cape burghers claimed a specific form of honour based on their status as defined in Dutch urban society, but found the recognition of this curtailed in a colony controlled by a commercial company that denied them political authority. Opposition of a faction of burghers to the VOC in the 1770s and 1780s produced alternative perceptions of honour that challenged the existing political order of the Cape by defining themselves as faithful and patriotic subjects standing up against tyranny." (Introduction, p. 13)

After 1680, alcohol retail at the Cape of Good Hope was controlled through a lease (pacht) system whereby free burghers could buy, on a competitive basis, the right to sell a specific type of alcohol in a certain region for one year. In this way, the VOC remained assured of a major direct source of revenue. However, this lease system was not in place with the establishment of a VOC outpost in 1652, but had a troubled and complex development in the decades before 1680. This article traces this development and shows how it was linked to changing ideas about the role of free burghers in the nascent colony, their economic conditions, and their relationship with the VOC authorities. It is argued that the system of alcohol retail as it was established in 1680, constituted a victory for free burgher interests, and that this development demonstrates how local political and economic interests were linked to the changing fortunes of the VOC in a wider context.

This article charts the development of VOC slave trading on the Cape to Madagascar slave route from 1676-1781. It demonstrates how the VOC developed its slave trading policy on the northwestern coast of Madagascar through the landmark voyages of the Company's slave expeditions of the Leijdsman (1715) and Brak (1741). The essay further describes typical first contacts between European and Malagasy on the coastline of Madagascar in the eighteenth century.

An annotated bibliography on the topic of the role of slaves in the origins and development of Afrikaans contributed to R.C.-H. Shell, S. Rowoldt Shell & M. Kamedien (eds), "Bibliographies of Bondage: Selected Bibliographies of South African Slavery and Abolition"

In 1657 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) released fourteen employees from its service who settled as free burghers at the Cape of Good Hope. By 1795 their number had grown to almost fifteen thousand. The original free burghers shared the same socio-cultural background and were uniformly poor. Yet in the course of the eighteenth century they developed into a stratified society with a clearly identifiable elite. Hitherto this development had been ascribed to capital accumulation in the form of land and slaves, with a focus on the settled arable farmers. This thesis challenges these arguments by applying the theoretical concept of entrepreneurship to the history of the 198 individuals who served as alcohol pachters (lease holders) in Cape Town between 1680 and 1795. The thesis argues that a study of their economic and social activities leads to greater conceptual clarity and a better understanding of the way in which social mobility operated. This study reveals how intertwined economic success was with social factors; and traces the changing uses and functions of kinship and social capital in VOC Cape Town. It demonstrates the importance of the urban free burghers to the Cape economy and the ways in which this group was linked to the rural free burghers.

The first chapter treats the origins and operation of the alcohol pacht (lease) system and its contribution to the Cape economy. This is followed by a prosopographical analysis of all 198 of the alcohol pachters. Chapter three presents the biography of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen as a vehicle with which to present the theoretical concepts attended on entrepreneurship, which are employed in the rest of the thesis. Chapter four illustrates the importance of social capital and kinship to what was still a largely immigrant society in the 1730s, while chapter five traces the changes which had occurred by the 1770s. These two chapters also demonstrate the ways in which the urban and rural elites coalesced over time. The final chapter shows to what extent the economic success of pachters was translated into other forms of power.

The discussion which follows was recorded in Cape Town on 23 September 2004. Its subject is the feature film “Proteus”, directed by Jack Lewis (South Africa) and John Greyson (Canada) and released in 2003. The film script was based on the records of a trial conducted before the Cape Council of Justice in August 1735. The defendants were Rijkaert Jacobsz of Rotterdam, a sailor in the employ of the Dutch East India Company and Claas Blank, a Khoekhoe from the south-west Cape. They stood accused of 'mutually perpetrated sodomy' with one another and they faced the death penalty if convicted. Both were prisoners on Robben Island.