Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface
- A note on terminology, country names, and currency
- 1 Setting the context: South Africa in international perspective
- 2 Seizing the land: conquest and dispossession
- 3 Making the labour force: coercion and discrimination
- 4 Creating the colour bar: formal barriers, poor whites, and ‘civilized’ labour
- 5 Exporting the gold: the vital role of the mineral revolution
- 6 Transforming the economy: the rise of manufacturing and commercial agriculture
- 7 Separating the races: the imposition of apartheid
- 8 Forcing the pace: rapid progress despite constraints
- 9 Hitting the barriers: from triumph to disaster
- 10 Confronting the contradictions: the final crisis and the retreat from apartheid
- Annexe 1 The people of South Africa
- Annexe 2 The land and the geographical environment
- Annexe 3 The labour force and unemployment
- Guide to further reading
- References
- Index
2 - Seizing the land: conquest and dispossession
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface
- A note on terminology, country names, and currency
- 1 Setting the context: South Africa in international perspective
- 2 Seizing the land: conquest and dispossession
- 3 Making the labour force: coercion and discrimination
- 4 Creating the colour bar: formal barriers, poor whites, and ‘civilized’ labour
- 5 Exporting the gold: the vital role of the mineral revolution
- 6 Transforming the economy: the rise of manufacturing and commercial agriculture
- 7 Separating the races: the imposition of apartheid
- 8 Forcing the pace: rapid progress despite constraints
- 9 Hitting the barriers: from triumph to disaster
- 10 Confronting the contradictions: the final crisis and the retreat from apartheid
- Annexe 1 The people of South Africa
- Annexe 2 The land and the geographical environment
- Annexe 3 The labour force and unemployment
- Guide to further reading
- References
- Index
Summary
European expansion into the interior
The process of conquest and dispossession began very early in the history of white settlement at the Cape. As outlined in Chapter 1, the Khoikhoi were forced almost immediately to cede parts of their traditional grazing lands to the Europeans who had landed in Table Bay to develop a refreshment station for the Netherlands East India Company (VOC). Thereafter, the dispossession of the Khoikhoi was swiftly accomplished. In 1672 two of the nomadic tribes were induced to sign treaties under which they surrendered control of a large area of land from Table Bay to Saldanha Bay in the north and to the mountains of Hottentots Holland in the east. The compensation actually paid for this was derisory and only a small fraction of the sums promised in the treaties. The war fought by a third tribe in the mid-1670s was the last occasion on which Khoikhoi in what is now the Western Cape offered organized resistance to white expansion. After that it would take another 100 years before the Europeans expanding eastward from this initial settlement made their first contact with the vanguard of Xhosa farmers moving westward along the coast. From that time forward the economic life of Africans and Europeans would be indissolubly bound together.
One fundamental reason for the slow pace at which the settlers increased both their activity and their numbers, and thus the area over which they operated, was the policy of the VOC. It was never the intention of the Company to promote the development of the colony as an independent territory.
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- An Economic History of South AfricaConquest, Discrimination, and Development, pp. 22 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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