LECTURE SERIES: Crime and Punishment in a Slave Society: The Case of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1795 (Law and History Workshop, 12 April 2022, ONLINE)

(Image source: Stanford Center for Law and History)

We learned that the next seminar of the Law and History Workshop organized by the Stanford Center for Law and History will be held on Tuesday, April 12, from 12:45-2:00PM (Pacific) in Room 320D, Stanford Law School, and via Zoom. 

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.” Professor Groenewald will present online but participants will be able to attend either in-person or online. 

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.

More information can be found here.