Children and Freedom in the Cape Colony - (Empire's Other Histories) by Rebecca Swartz (Hardcover)

About the Book

A study of children in the Cape colony during the period of slave emancipation to explore changing ideas of childhood in the British Empire.

Book Synopsis

Between 1830 and 1850 what it meant to be a child changed in fundamental ways across Britain's expanding empire.

This book presents a child-focused history of the period surrounding slave emancipation in the Cape colony and the British Empire. The status of children and childhood were central to discussions of the meaning of freedom in the Cape colony between 1820 and 1850. It proposes that Cape history can be reappraised by adding the category of 'age' to discussions of race, gender, class and colonialism. In debates regarding the shift from enslaved or coerced indigenous labour towards nominally free labour, a particular preoccupation was what this would mean for children in general, and for child labourers in particular.

There was significant concern regarding who counted as a child, and the measure by which childhood could be differentiated from adulthood. This was raised primarily through debates about child labour and education, including reflections on chronological age. In this period, chronological age became a crucial marker of colonial subjecthood, and a way in which the colony's population was managed. Drawing on diverse case studies from across the Cape colony and the British Empire, including archival material regarding apprenticeship for Khoe and formerly enslaved children, emigration and infant education, this book highlights the changing nature of childhood in the period 1820 to 1850. The book illustrates shows how children shaped, and were shaped by, both this colonial context and the changing nature of childhood across the British Empire.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Review Quotes

This is a fascinating, convincing, and urgently necessary account of how debates over what constituted 'freedom' in the post-emancipation Cape Colony were shaped by attitudes towards children and childhood. As a result, this book contributes significantly to scholarship on South Africa, the British Empire, and emancipation and enslavement.
Sarah Duff, Associate Professor, Colby College, USA

This is a very innovative and incisive study of the policies towards, and experiences of, children in the Cape Colony during a period of major reconstruction of labour and social organization. It brings the category of age into a historical literature currently focused on race, gender and class.
Nigel Worden, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Cape Town, South Africa

About the Author

Rebecca Swartz is Senior Lecturer in history at the University of the Free State, South Africa. A historian of empire, childhood and education her first book Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833-1880 was published in 2019.