Mercantile activity and investment in the Eastern Cape: The case of Queenstown 1853–1886

Abstract

Abstract Several studies have explored the operation of the mercantile sector in the Eastern Cape economy during the nineteenth century.1 The Eastern Cape story is worth examining because, after Cape Town, the region was a very active early locus of settlement and commercial activity. Not only this, but it was one of the densest areas of African population in the British-dominated parts of South Africa. Up to the present, however, much of the corpus of work on the Eastern Cape does not investigate local peculiarities. By way of an examination of the Queenstown district over the first thirty years of White settlement there, this article seeks to illuminate more fully some of the nuances in the manner in which the consolidation of colonial settlement and the operation of the mercantile sector co-existed.