Time, Space and the Political Economy of Merchant Colonialism in the Cape of Good Hope and VOC World

ABSTRACT

This article reviews Contingent Lives, a collection of essays on identity and material culture in the Cape and Dutch East India Company (VOC) world. This compilation is a substantial contribution to and reworking of a relatively neglected part of southern Africa's past. The focus on identities and cultures, especially of elites and citizens, opens up innovative avenues of enquiry. Yet, warning against the pitfalls of a narrow micro-analysis, this review argues for investigations that take both culture and political economy into account with the view of understanding mercantilism as a temporally distinct imperial project. It is by asking large-scale questions that historians are able to make sense of the numerous empirical studies of the Cape and VOC and link these to international literatures and debates. Most importantly, such an analytical frame prevents the labouring poor from slipping out of view, as it tends to do in this compilation, and draws attention to the importance of class in shaping identities and culture.

Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World. Edited by NIGEL WORDEN. Rondeboch: Historical Studies Department, University of Cape Town and ABC Press, 2007. vi + 612 pp. ISBN 978 0 620 38509 1

Keywords:

• VOC
• Cape Colony
• mercantilism
• colonialism
• early modern period
• material culture
• identity
• consumption
• citizens
• elites
• labouring poor