After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society

Abstract

This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrich's review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the 'cultural turn', transnational and microhistorical approaches.

“The War Took Its Origins in a Mistake”: The Third War of Dispossession and Resistance in the Cape of Good Hope Colony, 1799–1803

“…5 A detailed examination of the actual mechanics of the slide into hostilities, what Nigel Worden called a "microhistorical" approach, suggests that neither the fragility of British power in the Eastern Cape at the time nor the apparently accidental turn events took have been adequately examined. 6 This article therefore seeks to provide fresh perspectives on how colonial processes played themselves out at local level. In particular, the study explores why the British moved from military action against rebellious Boers to fighting the Xhosa when, up to 1799, British policy had been one of avoiding conflict with African polities on the Cape's eastern borderlands.…”