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.

What was it like to be a slave in colonial South Africa? What difference did freedom make? John Edwin Mason presents complex answers after delving into the slaves' experience within the slaveholding patriarchal household, primarily during the period from1820 to 1850.

The available information on Cape slavery during the eighteenth century is placed in the wider context of Dutch colonial society during this period

The Dutch East India Company's introduction of the first slave into the region known as the Cape of Good Hope in 1653 established an institution whose legal status ended in 1838 but whose social and political reverberations are still felt today. Children of Bondage is the story of the social, cultural, and biological progeny of that slave society. Robert Shell examines the complex and highly stratified hierarchies that evolved in South Africa, and outlines how its multiracial system of slavery was distinct from the biracial system that arose in the New World. Shell argues that while frontier and class interests were significant factors in South Africa's history, these influences were secondary manifestations of a more universal force, namely, the family as the fundamental unit of subordination. He explores the history of oceanic and domestic slave trades, sexual and gender relations within the slave hierarchy, religious and ethnic identities among slaves, and the promises and realities of manumission. By viewing the institution of South African slavery from many levels he concludes, "Not only slaves were in bondage; in a profound sense, the owners were as well."

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.