Material Culture and Colonial Networks in the Cape Colony and the Indian Ocean

Abstract

ABSTRACT This review article considers four recent books published on the social and cultural history of the Cape Colony and Batavia, spanning a chronological period from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The books address a wide range of topics and themes, but they all share an interest, to a greater or lesser extent, in the material culture of colonial societies and the networks of migration, political power and colonial knowledge. While Kerry Ward and Siegfried Huigen are concerned to expand the conceptual frontiers of the Cape Colony, Laura Mitchell and Yvonne Brink examine the nature of the settler society that first took root in the southwestern Cape and subsequently expanded to frontier regions. Each of these studies takes the study of colonialism in the Cape beyond the concerns of political economy that characterised the historiography of past decades. While there is much that is illuminating and fruitful in these approaches, this article also points to their limitations. Y. Brink, They Came to Stay: Discovering Meaning in the 18th Century Cape Country Dwelling. Stellenbosch: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2008. ix + 220 pp. ISBN 978 1 920109 39 4. L.J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property and Identity in Colonial South Africa (An Exploration of Frontiers, 1725–c.1830. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xv + 232 pp. ISBN 978 0 231 14252 6. S. Huigen, Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2009. xii + 273 pp. ISBN 978 90 04 17743 7. K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv + 340 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 74599 4.