Cape Town and Port Louis in the Eighteenth Century

The historiography of the Cape (indeed of South Africa more generally) is notoriously insular, but it is self-evident that a settlement which was founded as a minor cog in a major mercantilist project spreading across the Indian Ocean and which was subject to the ultimate authority of officials not only in the Netherlands but also in Batavia and Ceylon, was integrally a part of the Indian Ocean world and was shaped by forces from the East as much as from the North and West. Despite the theoretical and empirical insights that can be obtained from such comparative readings, there are few colonial port towns in the eighteenth century which offer direct parallels to the experience of Cape Town. Atlantic ports were not under the control of chartered companies, ¹ while the European factories and fort settlements of India and Southeast Asia were dependent upon pre-existing Asian social and trading systems, perched on the edges of local polities and societies. ² None of them were colonies of European settlement, and their towns were accordingly of a fundamentally different character to Cape Town. The closest parallel lies rather in the ports of the French colonies in the Mascarenes, and especially in Port Louis. Founded by the Compagnie des Indes (Cl), the port of lie de France (later Mauritius) served as the administrative and marketing centre of a French colonial settlement as well as constituting a vital part of French trading networks in the Indian Ocean. Although the historiography of Port Louis is as patchy as that of Cape Town, a focus on it points to some regional specifics of the western Indian Ocean and highlights some significant and hitherto neglected features of Cape Town’s early colonial history.