The bounds of bondage: Forced migration from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope during the Dutch East India Company era, c.1652--1795.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the split sovereignty of the United Provinces in the seventeenth century enabled the granting of sovereign rights to the Dutch East India Company under its founding charter that formed the legal basis of the Company's imperial realm. The Dutch East India Company devised a legal system in which it exercised its sovereignty in external law by engaging in formal diplomatic relations and concluding treaties with foreign polities. In internal (civil and criminal) law the Company exercised jurisdiction differentially over people according to the way they were categorized. The Dutch East India Company's empire was highly differentiated according to the variety of settlements from trading posts to fully-fledged settler colonies and the Company exercised its sovereign rights differently according to the type of settlement. The imperial capital of the Company empire was Batavia on the island of Java. Batavia was the seat of the High Government and the Court of Justice that was the appellate court for the whole empire. Batavia used its position as imperial capital to set up a network of exile to the major colonies. The Cape of Good Hope and other major Company settlements acted as penal colonies for Batavia, which transported part of its criminal population and also sent political and religious prisoners into exile. The Cape and Robben Island had a particular role in this network of exile as simultaneously the site most visited by Company ships and the most isolated from indigenous Asian networks of trade and shipping. It was therefore in a unique position to act as a penal colony for Batavia's criminals and for religious and political exiles from all over the Indies archipelago. This network of exile had particular consequences for the Company colony at the Cape of Good Hope. The Company officials were unwilling recipients of these prisoners from Batavia because they posed a security risk to the small colony. Increasingly over the eighteenth century, the exiles became a focal point for free burgher opposition against Company rule. The Company was not able to control the dynamics set in motion by this network of exile. Muslim political and religious exiles were important influences on the propagation of Islam at the Cape, while repatriated exiles took Cape Muslim practices back to the Indies.