The Dutch East India Company was chartered by the States General of the Netherlands in 1602. It had its centre in Batavia, until it was bankrupt and wound up in 1800. Kerry Ward argues that this early transnational corporation and de facto empire is best understood as ‘networks of trade, shipping, information, law, diplomacy, and migration that combined in different ways in each of its nodes to constitute the whole of its imperial web’ (p. 283). The strength of the empire was therefore a function of the density of these networks. She advocates this approach to studies of other phenomena; however, most scholars of African history will be more excited by her analysis of the Cape node of this network, and the lives and deaths of the convicts, slaves, and exiles who were sent there from the East Indies and other parts of the trading empire.
This highly original contribution to African scholarship was made possible by the author's wide studies – in Adelaide and Cape Town as well as Michigan – and broad perspective. Her book has evolved from a doctoral thesis, so Ward is more concerned with network theory than narrative. She adopts the defensive, dispassionate language expected of thesis-writers; and she makes no concession to geographically challenged readers who cannot find their own way around Indonesia, Sri Lanka, or southern Africa. Her publisher provides no illustrations, and only six inadequate sketch maps. Before examining the broader argument, African scholars might usefully begin with Chapter 6, where Ward describes the physical and social milieu of the Cape, and the ways in which people survived, collaborated, subverted, and sometimes rebelled in the town, in the interior, and on Robben Island, that prison within a prison.
This wider framework allows Networks of Empire to throw welcome new light on the social and political complexity of the Cape community. Convicts of different hues lived, worked, and died together. Royal Javanese exiles received stipends to cover their living expenses and brought slaves to attend them. Other convicts wielded authority as caffers (company police). Status, power, and opportunity were shaped by (among other things) nepotism, employment history, and religion; it is refreshing to find that eighteenth-century Cape society was more complex and more significant than a mere prologue to apartheid. Deportation from the Indies, for example, was intended to marginalize people who were too important to execute; it also served (through deportees such as the notable scholar Shaykh Yusuf in the 1690s) to disseminate Islam.
Ward's portrait of the Company is persuasive and bleak. The ‘Seventeen Gentlemen’ in Amsterdam struggled in vain against the determination of their employees to siphon off wealth through private trade. (Critics sniped that its initials VOC meant Vergaan Onder Corruptie, ‘Destroyed by Corruption’.) In Batavia, where leading officials lived like princes and evaded the regulations of the Seventeen Gentlemen, kinship was more important than competence in appointing, disciplining, and dismissing Company employees and cowing everyone else. Much creativity was invested in devising punishments – public execution, amputation, dismemberment, branding – to discourage dissent and repress rebellion. In that context, the Cape was not only a source of supplies but a fearsome place of exile for political or financial offenders. Cape officials might benefit from the labour of convicts, but resources were strained to provide hospitality for distinguished deportees and guards for dangerous ones. After the British occupation (Chapter 7), Botany Bay served the British in the same way that the Cape had served the Company, accommodating criminals and political deportees. (Robben Island even had its counterpart in Norfolk Island.)
Networks of Empire embodies a fresh approach and exceptional research. It may not convert many readers to network theory, but Ward's intriguing and suggestive detail will be a revelation for historians of South Africa.
