The transformation of British culture in the Eastern Cape, 1820–1860

Abstract

The 1820 Settlers left behind them a rich legacy of material culture: a modelled landscape, houses, ceramics, gravestones and other categories of artefacts. By applying the theoretical principles of structuralism, this evidence reveals the way in which these families on an early nineteenth century frontier conceived of, and ordered, their world. In this paper, we argue that British culture was transformed in the Eastern Cape in this period. Rather than re‐creating the material culture of their mother country, settlers combined elements of the current Georgian order with the archaic forms of the earlier eighteenth century, producing a cultural world consistent with the re‐creation of an agrarian way of life.