Counter-Elite Mobilization and Settler Colonialism: Political protest in the VOC Cape Colony, 1779

Jonathan Schoots, Stellenbosch University
Johan Fourie, Stellenbosch University

In 1779, following the American and preceding the French and Haitian Revolutions, settlers in the Cape Colony used the globally circulating language of citizen rights to challenge the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and demand greater political, economic, and legal power. Using detailed VOC records, we examine the structural roots of this movement in the settler colonial context of the Cape—an analysis previously impossible. We show that large-scale digitization and empirical testing enable a return to structural theories of political protest. We find that political contest at the Cape arose from a disconnect between imperial political power and settler economic and social power. Political protest was led by a counter-elite, not the marginalized majority, with participants being concentrated among rising local economic and social elites who were excluded from imperial governance. These findings challenge theories that attribute settler mobilization to populist uprising, nationalist identity formation, or relative deprivation. Instead, by taking a society-spanning view, we argue that elite competition, shaped by imperialist-settler power dynamics and the chasm between political power and economic or social power, was often at the heart of political conflict in settler colonies.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 222. The Dutch in the World, 1500–Present: From Small Republic to Global Might, Then Fading Light?