In this carefully researched study of European settlement in the Cape Colony's northern frontier, Laura J. Mitchell explores the ways in which the frontier society of the Olifants river valley in the Cedarburg was transformed into a thoroughly colonial society. This was not a sudden or radical transformation but rather one brought about by innumerable actions and decisions among people who ‘did not see themselves as historical players in a metanarrative’ (p. 5). Her focus is, as she writes, on belonging and belongings – on social networks and property. Her conception of the frontier is both spatial and temporal, a place and time where ‘heterodox and orthodox ideas, practices, and social relationships were in tension’ (p. 18), the former ultimately yielding to the latter.
Mitchell's focus on social ties and property, in the form of land, slaves, and household goods, takes her into the realm of the household. This is social history and, although she does not use the term, microhistory. Mitchell clearly has an intimate familiarity with the characters who populated this area over the course of a century, disentangling who married whom, who bought which farm when, whose fortunes rose and whose fell. Using various kinds of ‘lists’ – censuses, tax records, estate rosters, and auction rolls – Mitchell constructs narratives of the lives of settler families over generations and finds in those narratives evidence of widespread connections that enabled the conquest of the frontier, as well as evidence of changing material circumstances that reveal a newly forming colonial society that explicitly sought to link itself to the colonial center of Cape Town.
Mitchell writes that ‘Conquest was ultimately quotidian and domestic, rather than martial’ (p. 4). She explores a range of dynamics not usually incorporated into tales of colonial conquest, including gender relations, marriage, inheritance, land tenure, and relationships between parents and children. For example, Mitchell argues that women were crucial in the formation of networks and alliances through their exchange in marriage, noting the many ways in which the choice of marriage partner created multi-generational ties between specific settler families. These alliances across generations were possible because settlers widely ignored religious injunctions against first-cousin marriages, frequently choosing spouses within a fairly circumscribed set of families, and in the process creating a settler identity that contributed to the reification of racial categories and hierarchies seen across the Cape.
Mitchell also does her best to keep Khoisan and slaves in this story, although her sources impose major limitations on her ability to do so. She draws on the extant archeological evidence, but it cannot rival the textured detail in her written sources (which deal overwhelmingly with Europeans). That said, she is continually aware of the invisible presences in these stories. In a first-person account, a European woman at an auction details the organization of the festivities – tables set, oxen slaughtered, meals served, beds for visitors made up, and the like – while, as Mitchell observes, never giving her readers a view of the people carrying out all this labor. This is a recurring theme in the book, as is the inclusion of slaves in the ‘belongings’ that made settler life possible.
I have a few criticisms. The first half of the book examines concepts and contexts at length, but works at a level of abstraction and generality that is frustrating for the reader. The second half, where Mitchell examines different family stories drawing on a variety of colonial sources, is far more satisfying. And, for a book whose bedrock is an agrarian society, the reader unfamiliar with the Cedarburg is left a bit adrift as to the actual process of land use. One wishes that Columbia University Press had included a basic map; the reader needs to go online to feel oriented. We are told that these settlers were primarily stock farmers, but references to wheat crops and plows sit oddly with the assertion that the average rainfall in this area is 40 mm a year, and irrigation is not discussed. Finally, although Mitchell repeatedly asserts that violence was the backdrop to this story of colonial consolidation, and indeed determined its pace and shape, there is astonishingly little violence in the otherwise fascinating and textured stories of these families. The reader is left wondering about the relationship between frontier violence and domestic life in the enactment of European conquest.
Mitchell is at her strongest when she is integrating her conceptions of frontiers and colonial society with the evidence that she uses to good effect. This rich study of a particular place within an expanding imperial system offers not just compelling stories but also new ways of thinking about the processes of conquest and the transformation of frontier societies into colonial societies.
