Cape Town between East and West

This is the first single-volume social history of eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Town. Not only does it consider the elite inhabitants such as the ‘expat’ officials of the Dutch East India Company and the free burghers but it also includes members of Cape Town’s underclasses: soldiers and sailors, artisans, convicts, exiles and freed slaves. At the same time the book positions the town in the wider context of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and stresses its complex connections with Europe, Asia and Africa. It provides a fresh and vibrant understanding of this Dutch colonial town, the lives of its inhabitants, the identities they fashioned for themselves and the cultural landscape they created at the Cape.