In the first half of the nineteenth century the Cape Colony became not merely a colony of European settlement based on coerced black labor but one capable of expelling the agricultural amaXhosa from their land, annexing it, and driving them into the colony for work. In 1795 the colony, characterized by slavery and near slavery (of the indigenous pastoral Khoekhoen), as well as racial hierarchy, was ruled by the senescent mercantilist VOC, its furthest frontier of cattle, and sheep farmers recently having encountered resistance from San and amaXhosa in the East. VOC rule was replaced by the rising industrial power of Britain. Britain initially occupied the Cape in 1795 as a strategic wartime naval base in the Napoleonic wars. In 1803 the Cape reverted temporarily to the Batavian Republic but was retaken by the British in 1806 and permanently ceded in 1814.

In global terms, these shifts in the position of the Cape derived from the Napoleonic wars, themselves the consequence of political revolutions in France and America – which also triggered off a successful slave revolt in Haiti. This “age of democratic revolution” gave rise to new universalist ideas about freedom. The same era saw industrial capitalism emerge from a new factory system, chiefly in Britain. The new, “autocratically ruled yet uncentralised” British Empire had as its premise the central role of overseas markets in sustaining industrial development. India was the central market, and China the huge, untapped market to be aspired to. “Free trade” was projected as the way for the British to dominate the world. Within this, the Cape was taken over above all as a way station on the route to the east.