Sustaining Sovereignty through Law at the Cape Colony, 1795–1803

Abstract

The first British occupation of the Cape, 1795–1803, involved a military invasion that overthrew the erstwhile Dutch East India Company and set about erecting a new colonial political order. Reflecting the socio-political upheaval that ensued, unique archival documents suggest how colonial law provided procedures, an argot, and punishment practices that generated and sustained lasting images of sovereignty in context. In efforts to grasp the complex symbiotic alliances that enabled Cape colonial sovereignty and law to surface, this paper examines several texts that highlight the interactions through which colonial law declared, enforced, and summoned a colonial politics of sovereign power. In turn, this sovereignty politics yielded ethical images of justice and justifications for punishment that persist, even if in altered form, through postcolonial horizons. Understanding that colonial legacy could, therefore, be deeply consequential for continuing ethical debates about the justice of sovereigns, laws and punishments through which governance is nowadays calculated.