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The Cape Colony (Dutch: ''Kaapkolonie'') was between 1652 and 1691 a commandment, and between 1691 and 1795 a governorate of the Dutch East India Company. The colony was founded by Jan van Riebeeck as a re-supply and layover port for vessels of the Dutch East India Company trading with Asia. Much to the dismay of the rulers of the Dutch East India Company, who were primarily interested in making profit from the Asian trade, the colony rapidly expanded into a settler colony in the years after its founding. Being the only permanent settlement of the Dutch East India Company not serving as a trading post, it proved an ideal retirement place for employees of the company. After several years of service in the company, employees could lease a piece of land in the colony as a Vryburgher ("free citizen"), on which they had to cultivate crops that they had to sell to the Dutch East India Company for a fixed price. As these farms were labour-intensive, Vryburghers imported slaves from Madagascar, Mozambique and Asia, which rapidly increased the number of inhabitants.〔 After Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes (October 1685), which had protected the right of Huguenots in France to practise their religion without persecution from the state, the colony attracted many Huguenot settlers, who eventually mixed with the general Vryburgher population. Due to the authoritarian rule of the Company, telling farmers what to grow for what price, controlling immigration, and monopolising trade, some farmers tried to escape the rule of the company by moving further inland. The Company, in an effort to control these migrants, established a magistracy at Swellendam in 1745 and another at Graaff Reinet in 1786, and declared the Gamtoos River as the eastern frontier of the colony, only to see the Trekboere cross it soon afterwards. In order to avoid collision with the Bantu peoples advancing south and west from east central Africa, the Dutch agreed in 1780 to make the Great Fish River the boundary of the colony. In 1795, the colony was occupied by the British, after the Battle of Muizenberg. Under the terms of the Peace of Amiens of 1802, the colony was returned to the Dutch on 1 March 1803, but as the Dutch East India Company had since been nationalized, the colony was ruled directly by the Batavian Republic. The return was not to last long, however, as the breaking out of the Napoleonic Wars invalidated the Peace of Amiens. In January 1806, the colony was occupied for a second time by the British after the Battle of Blaauwberg. This transfer was confirmed in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. ==History== Traders of the Dutch East India Company (''VOC''), under the command of Jan van Riebeeck, were the first people to establish a European colony in South Africa. The Cape settlement was built by them in 1652 as a re-supply point and way-station for Dutch East India Company vessels on their way back and forth between the Netherlands and Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The support station gradually became a settler community, the forebears of the Afrikaners, a European ethnic group in South Africa. At the time of first European settlement in the Cape, the southwest of Africa was inhabited by Bushmen and Hottentots who were pastoral people with a population estimated between 13,000 and 15,000.〔 Conflicts with the settlers and the effects of smallpox decimated their numbers in 1713 and 1755, until gradually the breakdown of their tribal society led them to work for the colonists, mostly as shepherds and herdsmen. The local Khoikhoi had neither a strong political organisation nor an economic base beyond their herds. They bartered livestock freely to Dutch ships. As Company employees established farms to supply the Cape station, they began to displace the Khoikhoi. Conflicts led to the consolidation of European landholdings and a breakdown of Khoikhoi society. Military success led to even greater Dutch East India Company control of the Khoikhoi by the 1670s. The Khoikhoi became the chief source of colonial wage labour. After the first settlers spread out around the Company station, nomadic European livestock farmers, or Trekboeren, moved more widely afield, leaving the richer, but limited, farming lands of the coast for the drier interior tableland. There they contested still wider groups of Khoikhoi cattle herders for the best grazing lands. By 1700, the traditional Khoikhoi lifestyle of pastoralism had disappeared. The Cape society in this period was thus a diverse one. The emergence of Afrikaans, a new vernacular language of the colonials that is however intelligible with Dutch, shows that the Dutch East India Company immigrants themselves were also subject to acculturation processes. By the time of British rule after 1795, the sociopolitical foundations were firmly laid. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dutch Cape Colony」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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