Choosing respectability: The social mix of Cape Town between 1795 and 1840

Extracted from text ... Choosing respectability: The social mix of Cape Town between 1795 and 1840 Pawel Stempowski There were many changes in early nineteenth-century Cape Town. With the permanent arrival of the British in 1806, the city was transformed from the remnants of an undeveloped, highly regulated economy, administered by the eventually bankrupted Dutch East India Company, to `the capital of an expanding British Colony'. The arrival of the British brought with it the expansion of trade and the concomitant rise of a middle-class merchant strata that slowly increased its economic and social influence.1 Along with the British, came new administrators, soldiers ..