The Dutch East India Company and its Outposts: Colonial Ecotones in Islands by Dan Sleigh

Cape Town archivist Dan Sleigh’s epic historical novel Islands (2004) provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the Dutch East India Company’s colonial settlement of the Cape of Good Hope and of its outposts, including Mauritius, in the second half of the 17th century. Halfway between Europe and Batavia—the ‘Golden Orient’—the Cape is presented as a geographical, economic and cultural hinge between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, between West and East, and also between the Dutch colonists and the indigenous Koina peoples. Against a backdrop of the war-stricken Netherlands and Germany, S... Mehr ...