The Cape's colonial elites

And how they preserved power

From today, my regular Friday posts will move to Thursdays, giving you an extra day in the week to read them. Enjoy!

Every December, a ritual played out at the Castle of Good Hope. The Governor and his Council of Policy would appoint four men to serve as heemraden in the Stellenbosch–Drakenstein district – the local officials who administered justice, settled disputes, and enforced the rules of rural life. The outgoing heemraden nominated double their number as candidates. The Governor picked from the list. In theory, these were simply the district’s most capable settlers.

In practice, at least half came from the richest ten per cent of households.

This is the central finding of a new study of colonial elites at the Cape I wrote with Robert Ross and Leoné Walters, recently published in the Revista de Historia Industrial.¹ Using newly digitised annual tax censuses – the opgaafrolle – and lists of heemraden extracted from the Resolutions of the Council of Policy, we trace the relationship between economic rank and political authority in the wine-producing heartland of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein between 1720 and 1810.² The picture that emerges is one of tight alignment between wealth and office – and of a colonial state that depended on that alignment to function.

Here’s why these results are interesting from a political economy/political science perspective: Colonial states cannot survive on coercion alone. The costs of repression are too high. To endure, they need local allies – people with enough to gain from the system to help run it, and enough to lose to stay loyal. At the Cape, those allies were the district’s wealthiest farmers. Understanding how that bargain worked tells us something important about colonial governance far beyond the south-western tip of Africa…