“Crime and Punishment in a Slave Society: The Case of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1795” with Gerald Groenewald and Grant Parker
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The Stanford Center for Law and History will hold its second workshop of the Quarter on Tuesday, April 12, from 12:45-2:00 PM (Pacific). Gerald Groenewald, University of Johannesburg (with additional commentary by co-researcher Grant Parker, Stanford Classics) will present, “Crime and Punishment in a Slave Society: The Case of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1795.”
The workshop will be a hybrid event held in-person (Room 320D) and via Zoom. As a reminder, we ask that you RSVP for each workshop in advance so that we can circulate the paper, provide the Zoom link to the event, and for food ordering purposes for those of you who wish to join us in-person. Please read the paper in advance.
Current guidelines do not allow us to bring food into events. For those who attend in-person, however, lunch will be provided at 12:25PM, 20 minutes before the workshop outside of Room 320D.
We also ask all those who attend in-person to comply with current Stanford event guidelines which can be found here.
To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event.
Abstract:
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a maritime service station at the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. Within a few years European settlers developed an agricultural colony based on the use of bonded labor for which slaves were imported from all over the Indian Ocean world. By the end of VOC rule in 1795, the colony had grown to about 15 000 settlers and some 20 000 slaves. These people all fell under the jurisdiction of the VOC which employed Roman-Dutch criminal law in its settlements. This paper is based on an investigation of the sentences of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope during the VOC era. Historians of the Dutch Republic in the early modern period have demonstrated how a ‘civilizing process’ (Norbert Elias) had occurred whereby punishments became less public and less violent, alongside the gradual rise of ideas of reform. This paper investigates if this development in metropolitan thinking about crime and punishment was replicated in the colonial space and how, if it all, the institution of slavery complicated the situation. Based on a statistical analysis of all the remaining sentences of the Council of Justices, the paper demonstrates that while for the colonist population punishments did indeed become less severe from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, this was not the case for the slave population for whom cruel ‘mirror’ punishments continued right until the end of the eighteenth century when the Cape passed to British control.
