The first slave reached the Cape in 1653, a year after the first white settler party under Jan van Riebeeck. Thousands more would follow. Slavery was to remain an institution here until the end of the Dutch period in 1795, and well beyond, for it was not until 1834, under British administration, that Cape slaves were finally emancipated. In Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, Karel Schoeman describes the transplanting of slavery from the Dutch colonies in the East and the first sixty years of its development under local conditions, basing his account mainly on contemporary sources and providing as much information on individual slaves and their lives as these allow. Attention is likewise given to the gradual manumission of slaves and the slow development of a 'free black' community at the Cape towards the close of the seventeenth century.

Crossing the remote, southern tip of Africa has fired the imagination of European travellers from the time Bartholomew Dias opened up the passage to the East by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes formed an endless stream of seafarers who made the long journey southwards in pursuit of wealth, adventure, science, and missionary, as well as outright national, interest. Beginning by considering the early hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Cape and their culture, Malcolm Jack focuses in his account on the encounter that the European visitors had with the Khoisan peoples, sometimes sympathetic but often exploitative from the time of the Portuguese to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. This commercial and colonial background is key to understanding the development of the vibrant city that is modern Cape Town, as well as the rich diversity of the Cape hinterland. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures shows how the common practice of reading can illuminate the social and political history of a culture. This ground-breaking study reveals resistance strategies in the reading and writing practices of South Africans; strategies that have been hidden until now for political reasons relating to the country's liberation struggles. By looking to records from a slave lodge, women's associations, army education units, universities, courts, libraries, prison departments, and political groups, Archie Dick exposes the key works of fiction and non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers that were read and discussed by political activists and prisoners. Uncovering the book and library schemes that elites used to regulate reading, Dick exposes incidences of intellectual fraud, book theft, censorship, and book burning. Through this innovative methodology, Dick aptly shows how South African readers used reading and books to resist unjust regimes and build community across South Africa's class and racial barriers.

"Account of of the slave trade and its lasting effects on modern life, based on the history of the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain"--

In From Bengal to the Cape, Professor Ansu Datta opens up a hitherto little researched topic of transoceanic slave trade between mainly southern Bengal and the Cape in the Republic of South Africa. This migration took place between roughly the 1650s and about the middle of the nineteenth century when the slave trade was finally abolished. The book offers a short account of the condition in which the Bengali slaves found themselves and in the Cape peninsular society following their dispersal during these early times. It highlights new social formations in the Cape society, especially among the Coloured in South Africa. Few are aware of this export trade principally from Bengal, the Coromandel Coast, and Malabar. Dattas researches took him to the National Archives of Cape Town, and to some universities in South Africa. He obtained records from Municipalities and interviewed people who today claim descent from Bengali slaves. The book underscores the need for further research on this unexplored issue in India and South Africa.

Early modern globalization was built on a highly labour intensive infrastructure. This book looks at the millions of workers who were needed to operate the ships, ports, store houses, forts and factories crucial to local and global exchange. These sailors, soldiers, craftsmen and slaves were crucial to globalization but were also confronted with the process of globalization themselves. They were often migrants who worked, directly or indirectly, for trading companies, merchants and producers that tried to discipline and control their labour force. The contributors to this volume offer an integrated, thematic study of the global history of desertion in European, Atlantic and Asian contexts. By tracing and comparing acts and patterns of desertion across empires, economic systems, regions and types of workers, Desertion in the Early Modern World illuminates the crucial role of practices of desertion among workers in shaping the history of imperial and economic expansion in the early modern period.

A fascinating account of the trade patterns and consumption practices that arose following European colonisation of the Atlantic world. Focusing on textiles and clothing, Robert DuPlessis reveals how globally sourced goods shaped the material existence of virtually every group in the Atlantic basin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.