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The British colony was preceded by an earlier corporate colony that became an original Dutch colony of the same name, which was established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The Cape was under VOC rule from 1652 to 1795 and under rule of the Napoleonic Batavia Republic from 1803 to 1806. [ 4 ]
The war of 1817–1819 led to the first wave of immigration of British settlers of any considerable scale, an event with far-reaching consequences. The then-governor, Lord Charles Somerset, whose treaty arrangements with the Xhosa chiefs had proved untenable, wished to buffer the Cape from contact with the Xhosa by settling white colonists in the border region.
Direct British rule in the Cape Colony had recently been replaced by responsible government, and the newly elected Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope in Cape Town, under the liberal Molteno-Merriman government, resented the perceived high-handed manner in which Lord Carnarvon presented his proposals from afar without an understanding of local ...
A photograph of the Port Elizabeth – Uitenhage railway line in 1877 The crest of the now defunct Cape Government Rails as seen in the Cape Town central train station. The Cape Government Railways (CGR) was the government-owned railway operator in the Cape Colony from 1874 until the creation of the South African Railways (SAR) in 1910.
In 1795, after the Battle of Muizenberg in present-day Cape Town, the British occupied the colony. Under the terms of the Peace of Amiens of 1802, Britain ceded the colony back to the Dutch on 1 March 1803, but as the Batavian Republic had since nationalized the United East India Company (1796), the colony came under the direct rule of The Hague.
In 1854, the Cape Colony elected its first parliament, on the basis of the multiracial Cape Qualified Franchise, whereby suffrage qualifications applied universally, regardless of race. After a long political struggle, this was followed by responsible government in 1872, when the Cape won the right to elect its own locally-accountable executive ...
The Cape Colony was administered from two towns, the larger Cape Town on the wide Table Bay facing west and smaller Simon's Town on False Bay facing south. Neither bay was sheltered from Atlantic storms and both were notoriously dangerous, with winds, currents and rocks posing considerable threats to shipping. [3]
The written history of the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa began when Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias became the first modern European to round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. [1] In 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed along the whole coast of South Africa on his way to India, landed at St Helena Bay for 8 days, and made a detailed ...