Children and Freedom in the Cape Colony: Age, Labour and Apprenticeship in the Post-Emancipation British Empire

(Hardback)

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Between 1830 and 1850 what it meant to be a child changed in fundamental ways across Britains expanding empire.

This open access book investigates ideas about children and childhood in the Cape colony in the context of slave emancipation, showing how the rebirth and reshaping of values were reflected in the insistent focus of children as the future of the colony.

Arguing that children became the subject of philanthropic and humanitarian initiatives in the context of slave emancipation, Swartz shows that these initiatives were not limited to the children of slaves but also middle, upper and lower class English children sent to the colonies from England. It builds on the rich historiography on slave emancipation at the Cape, and through the focus on children brings a new understanding to changing race and labour dynamics in this settler colony. Presenting a series of cases that situate philanthropic involvement, humanitarian campaigning and government endeavours in a British imperial context, it covers topics from convict labour to child emigration and education. This book shows how central children were to the imagined future of the colony, and uncovers childrens own experiences and voices from the archive.

Situating these developments in a broader history of childhood in the British Empire, Schwartz uses archival material to reconstruct childrens experiences of the Cape colony, and shows how children shaped, and were shaped by, this colonial context.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Author Bio

Rebecca Swartz is Senior Lecturer in history at the University of the Free State, South Africa. A historian of empire, childhood and education her first book Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833-1880 was published in 2019.