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.

This volume documents the analysis of excavated historical archaeological collections at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The corpus provides a rich picture of life and times at this distant outpost of an immense Dutch seaborne empire during the contact period. Representing over three decades of excavation, conservation, and analysis, the book examines ceramics, glass, metal, and other categories of artifacts in their archaeological contexts. An enclosed CD includes a video reconstruction plus a comprehensive catalog and color illustrations of the artifacts in the corpus. The parallels and contrasts this volume reveals will help scholars studying the European expansion period to build a richer comparative picture of colonial material culture.

The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths - not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the 'Hottentot', and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now 'a vanished people'.

This richly illustrated history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule tells the story of its residents, the world they inhabited and the city they made - beginning in the seventeenth century with the tiny Dutch settlement, hemmed in by mountains and looking out to sea, and ending with the well-established British colonial city, poised confidently on the threshold of the twentieth century. This social history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule traces the changing character of the city and portrays the varied lives and experiences of its inhabitants e" black and white, rich and poor, slave and free, Christian and Muslim. The story told in these pages is both immensely readable and endlessly interesting, and is sure to remain for long the definitive history of the city. The volume is illustrated throughout with a wealth of paintings, maps and photographs. The book is written for the general reader as well as academics.

Hans den Besten (1948-2010) made numerous contributions to Afrikaans linguistics over a period of nearly three decades. This title presents a selection of Den Besten's most important papers concerning the structure and history of Afrikaans.

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks. Contributors include: Paul Arblaster, Hans den Besten, Frans Blom, Britt Dams, Adrien Delmas, Alette Fleischer, Antje Flüchter, Michiel van Groesen, Henk de Groot, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Grégoire Holtz, Siegfried Huigen, Elspeth Jajdelska, Maria-Theresia Leuker, Edwin van Meerkerk, Bruno Naarden, and Christina Skott.

In 1724-1726, the Dutch clergyman François Valentyn published a 5,000-page account of the Dutch East India Company’s empire. It was the first and, for a long time, the only survey of the Dutch establishments in Asia and South Africa. Shaping a Dutch East Indies analyses how Valentyn composed this work and how it largely determined the Dutch perspective on the colonies in Asia until the 1850s. It seeks to highlight both the great diversity of knowledge gathered in Valentyn’s book and its geographical spread, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, with a focus on the Indonesian archipelago. Huigen’s book is the first in-depth study of Valentyn’s work, which is a foundational text in the history of Dutch colonialism.