THE NORTHEASTERN FACTOR IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY: REEVALUATING THE VOLUME OF THE SLAVE TRADE OUT OF DELAGOA BAY AND ITS IMPACT ON ITS HINTERLAND IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINELL CHEWINS ◽  
PETER DELIUS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Trading System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
Mascarene Islands

AbstractThis article, largely on the basis of in-depth research in archives in Lisbon, provides an account of the trading systems linking Delagoa Bay to its southern hinterland. Within this framework we argue that the role of the slave trade has been previously underestimated. There is evidence that the booming demand for slaves in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands hit this region with force. The scale of that trade is difficult to establish because it was, by and large, illicit and so not systematically recorded. There are indications of a significant trade prior to 1823 and a substantial one after that date. There is also evidence that northern Nguni groups, including the Zulu kingdom, were deeply involved in this trading system. The main sources of captives, however, were militarily weak societies, like the Tembe, which lived closer to the Bay.

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

Bibles and Beads: Missionaries as Traders in Southern Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Beck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Metal Tools ◽  
London Missionary Society

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.

Abolition on shore

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Naval Officers

Naval officers played a part in a reconfiguration of relations between Britain and West Africa in the early nineteenth century, as British abolitionist ideals and policies were introduced in the colony of Sierra Leone and increasingly rolled out along the coast. This chapter details the role of naval officers in the pursuit of anti-slavery treaties with African rulers, the encouragement of ‘legitimate’ trade (as non-slave-based trade was termed) and assisting increased exploration and missionary efforts. All were tied to the desire to end the slave trade at source in West African societies via the spread of European ideas of ‘civilization’ among African peoples. Officers’ narratives are revealing of increasing British intervention in West Africa, and how economic and strategic advantages for Britain became inextricable from humanitarian incentives.

THE GREAT DEBATE AND THE ORIGINS OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW BANK
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1870s ‘when the first major historian [G. M. Theal] began to write his history’. Prior to Theal's monumental efforts, ‘only a few amateur historians had turned their hands to the writing of the history of particular areas or topics’. Likewise, in Smith's analysis, also published in 1988, the construction of South African history in terms of race is seen almost exclusively as the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a very brief introductory section, Smith suggests that what little historical writing there was before the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely to be taken seriously, and his study offers no more than a bare outline of historiographical developments before Theal and his heirs.

The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Marques
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Trading Networks ◽  
The U.S

This book explores U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas from the American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War. It shows how U.S. citizens engaged in multiple forms of participation in the slave trade and how these forms changed over time. The book discusses the emergence of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of independence and its quick dismantling in the early nineteenth century. It then looks at the forms of U.S. participation in a highly internationalized contraband slave trade that supplied captives to Brazil and Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of these forms of U.S. participation resonated in the U.S. public sphere, contributing to growing tensions around the slavery issue in the 1850s, and in the international arena, stimulating frictions between the British Empire and the United States. This work explores these national and international tensions and the role of slave-trading networks in exploiting and prolonging them.

Dispossession and Accumulation in the South African Interior: The Boers and the Tlhaping of Bethulie, 1833–61

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Keegan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
African History ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Colonial Capitalism

This article seeks to illuminate some important themes in nineteenth-century South African history by examining the fate of a small chiefdom of difaqane refugees who settled in 1833 just north of the Orange River under the patronage of a French Protestant missionary. It situates the history of the Tlhaping of Bethulie against the background of the expansion of white settlement north of the Orange River and the development of colonial capitalism in the larger region. The processes of white state formation north of the Orange in the middle years of the century, especially the seminal role of British intervention during the period of the Orange River Sovereignty, are examined. The corresponding rise of white elites and the varied primitive forms of capital accumulation employed by the emerging Boer notables are investigated. The article then seeks to provide a concrete study of these themes in a local setting. These encircling developments provided the context for the rising tensions and conflicts at the Bethulie mission station and in the Tlhaping community in the 1850s. The gradual alienation of the Bethulie lands to private ownership eventually led to the destruction of the territory and the break-up of the community. These processes are examined within the context of the rise of local Boer notables and the nature of state structures in the Orange Free State Republic established in 1854. In the end those who orchestrated and benefited from the dismemberment of the Bethulie territory were those who controlled the instruments of patronage and power in the local Boer state.

Oral Evidence in a Pseudo-Ethnicity: The Fingo Debate

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 359-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African History ◽  
Cover Story ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
Oral Evidence

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.

Learning Zulu

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
South African ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
African History ◽  
African Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Correct Form ◽  
Linguistic Purism

When this book's author began studying Zulu, he was often questioned why he was learning it. This book places the author's endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. The book combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, the book reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. The book looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, the book examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, the book explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

‘Our passion for legality’: international law and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Britain

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Congo Free State

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document