Colonial world-making and global knowledges at the early modern Cape of Good Hope

Abstract

As the Cape of Good Hope was integrated into early modern colonial world-making projects, it came to be regarded as ‘the western part of the East Indies’. The initial elaboration of this imaginary was contingent upon the contours of Dutch mobility in the Indian Ocean and material exigencies on the ground at the Cape. Early commanders sought to transform the colony’s environment, culture, and demographic constitution into a mirror of their productive East Indian colonies. Relatedly, some Indigenous Khoekhoe, forcibly transported to Java to train as colonial servants, came to understand Europeans — and the dangers they posed — in relation to the East Indies. This contingent colonial world-making soon gave rise to broader epistemic frameworks linking the southern African territory to Asia. European travellers began remarking on the purported similarities between the Cape’s plants, colonial customs and material culture, and Khoekhoe practices and those of the East Indies. By the end of the seventeenth century, some travellers even hypothesized that the Chinese had visited the Cape before the birth of Christ. Exploring the causes and consequences of the Cape’s integration into the East Indies, this article underlines how contingent geopolitical designations reshaped scholarly descriptions of natures and cultures in southern Africa.