INTRODUCTION

The seizure of the Cape Colony by Britain in 1795 introduced new ideas as to how the relation between nation and colony in Southern Africa should be articulated. After first surveying British writings on the Cape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this chapter examines the contrasting models of colonial governance produced for the Cape Colony by two eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers – Adam Smith (1723–90) and John Bruce (1744–1826). There is no explicit debate between Smith and Bruce to record – Smith wrote in the 1770s and Bruce in the 1790s – but they both range between the general question as to how Britain's colonial policy should proceed, and the particular question of how Britain should reconfigure the political economy of the Cape. Although the primary material analysed here is narrowly focused, Smith and Bruce's writings on the Cape not only reveal the variety of British models of colonial governance for the empire as a whole, but they also provoke theoretical questions about the articulation of the economic and the political in emergent colonial nationalisms. I focus upon three issues. The first is how in political terms the relation between nation and colony should be constituted, or more specifically, whether Britain should govern through indigenous proxy rulers (indirect rule) or whether it should develop its own colonial administration (direct rule). The second issue is how the economics of colonial trade should be regulated, or more specifically, whether trade protectionism or free trade should be the guiding principle.