ABSTRACT
The development of the Cape Colony during the hundred years before the discovery of diamonds was slight by comparison with that of the following century; but when measured against the first hundred years after van Riebeeck, it was immense. The strategic value of the Colony grew in the context of the eighteenth-century colonial wars, a larger and larger proportion of the ships to visit the Cape was of other than Dutch origin—French, British, Danish, American in many cases, always more foreign than Dutch after 1772. Just as the consolidation of Albany was the main reason for introducing the British Settlers of 1820, so the need to consolidate British Kaffraria lay behind the British Government’s decision in 1856 to establish a settlement of Germans. Cape society was very diverse in its cultural origins. Behind the British movement for the emancipation of subject peoples stood a combination of new forces.
