Nigel Worden | University of Cape Town (original) (raw)

Books by Nigel Worden

The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1995

Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ideas of honour in two colo... more Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ideas of honour in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. In both regions swirled a free, and often transient, population of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts, all with diverse backgrounds and transnational experiences. The mobile populations of colonial societies brought together cultures that held disparate, even contradictory, codes of honour and during these times of fl ux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed.

Each of the thirteen chapters considers honour in a particular sphere – legal, political, religious or personal – and in different contexts determined by the distinctive and changing matrix of race, gender and class, as well as the distinctions of free and unfree status in each colony. The first half of the volume shows how and why the political, ideological and moral stakes of the concept of honour were particularly important in colonial societies, while the later chapters look more closely at the social behaviour and the purchase of honour within more specific groups. Together, the chapters collectively demonstrate that there was never a clear distinction between politics and social life, and honour crossed between the public and private spheres.

The book brings together historians of Australia and South Africa to highlight thought-provoking parallels and contrasts between the Cape and Australian colonies that will be of interest to all scholars of colonial societies and the concept of honour. It contains the following chapters:

Introduction: Honourable intentions?
PENNY RUSSELL AND NIGEL WORDEN

1 Defining and defending honour in law
KIRSTEN MCKENZIE

2 The Honourable Company: VOC rule at the Cape
NIGEL PENN

3 Honourable colonisation? Australia
PENELOPE EDMONDS

4 Honour and religion in the Cape Colony
ROBERT ROSS

5 Honour, information and religion: New South Wales,
1780s–1850s
ALAN ATKINSON

6 The politics of burgher honour in the Cape Colony,
1770s–1780s
TEUN BAARTMAN

7 Honour and liberal governance in the Australian and Cape
colonies, 1820s–1850s
CHRIS HOLDRIDGE

8 Defending honour in Dutch Cape settler society
NIGEL WORDEN

9 Defending honour in Australian settler society
CATIE GILCHRIST

10 Honour among slaves and indigenous people in
the Cape Colony
RICHARD WATSON

11 Honour among convict and Aboriginal men in 1820s New
South Wales
JAMES DROWN AND PENNY RUSSELL

12 Honour, morality and sexuality in the eighteenth-century Cape
Colony
GERALD GROENEWALD

13 Honour, morality and sexuality in
nineteenth-century Sydney
PENNY RUSSELL

Cape Town between east and west: social identities in a Dutch colonial town, 2012

N.Worden and G.Groenewald (eds) Trials of slavery: selected documents concerning slaves from the criminal records of the Council of Justice of the Cape of Good Hope, 1705-1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society), 2005

Papers by Nigel Worden

War, empire and slavery, 2010

Cultural analysis of the 1808 slave revolt in the Cape Colony

unpublished paper presented at the Gender in the European Town conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 2013

, the Cape Town burgher Jacobus van de Berg left his house on the town's fashionable Strand Stree... more , the Cape Town burgher Jacobus van de Berg left his house on the town's fashionable Strand Street to walk to the nearby warehouse from where he ran his wine business. He was drawing his watch out of his pocket to check the time when he felt a fierce blow to his head from behind, knocking his hat to the ground. He was about to pick it up when he felt another blow with a stick and panicking he took flight. His assailant was Jan de Villiers Abrahamszoon, a member of the Stellenbosch heemraad (local council), who had been hiding for a while in the stables in a nearby house and then took up position behind the pillars supporting the balcony of a residence opposite that of van de Berg, knowing that he regularly walked past the spot after lunch. When van de Berg took flight, Abrahamszoon chased after him down the street, delivering more blows and shouting out, 'stay here, you scoundrel, you rogue'. Van de Berg escaped into the house of the burgher Stephanus Spengler, retiring into an inside room and locking the door behind him. He emerged after some time and made his way back onto the street but Abrahamszoon reappeared, shouting insults and swearing at him, 'chasing him with his stick to all corners of the street' and saying, 'Why are you running away? Come here', to which van de Berg replied, 'It is far too unseemly to fight like slaves or youngsters in the street'. He was then, in his words, 'lucky enough' to reach the house of Elizabeth de Preez 'in great fear and trembling' to ask for assistance. She invited him to wait inside' until Abrahamszoon, not finding him in the street, went away and van de Berg was able to safely return home. 1 This fracas did not go unobserved. The slave Rachel van de Caap was returning to her master's house after taking his children back to school for the afternoon and she saw it all. She picked up van de Berg's hat and followed him. 2 Brandmeester Hercules Zandberg was standing on his balcony and van de Berg called on him to be a witness to what had occurred. Elizabeth du Preez reported that she had been taking her afternoon nap but was disturbed by the noise, looked out of her window and

Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, 2003

Archaeology and Memory, 2011

Social Dynamics, 1991

ABSTRACT This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has ... more ABSTRACT This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has appeared in English over the past twenty years. This work has made important modifications to the notion that Brazilian slavery was part of a benign seigneurial society, markedly different from that of other New World colonies. By selecting five themes ‐ the transition from indigenous Indian to imported African slavery; slavery and rural production; slaves on the mines and in the towns; treatment of slaves; and the causes of emancipation ‐ the article draws attention to features of comparative interest to slavery elsewhere and particularly to that at the Cape.

Itinerario, 2007

... But Marieke Bloembergen offers us something rather different and her book makes an important ... more ... But Marieke Bloembergen offers us something rather different and her book makes an important contri-bution to this rich field of study. ... examines the displays about the Dutch East Indies at each event, including detailed accounts of the background, organisational pol-itics and ...

This article examines the ways in which the voluminous archive of the Dutch East India Company (V... more This article examines the ways in which the voluminous archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) controlled, constructed and delimited the presence of slaves in the paper world of the VOC empire. The extensive paper archive of the VOC recorded slaves in ways which matched the concerns of the administration, such as enumeration in census returns and as objects for inheritance or sale in estate inventories. Nonetheless, historians have been able to uncover considerably more information about their experience and agency. Much detail is provided in criminal and (to a lesser extent) civil judicial records, which explains the emphasis on individual and collective resistance in the slave historiography of the 1980s. More recently Cape historians have adapted techniques of reading across the grain in order to explore the mentalité and cultural worlds of Cape slaves. However, the VOC archive was not only a record of the ruling classes. Slaves also used writing for their own purposes, either in alternative networks of literacy in Asian languages or by turning Dutch papers into documents for their own advantage, some of which has found its way into the official documents. The combination of these records with oral traditions and community memories have enabled Cape historians to transcend the apparent silence of the official archive.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2016

Cape Town during the eighteenth century was an integral part of the Dutch East India Company (VOC... more Cape Town during the eighteenth century was an integral part of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading empire in the Indian Ocean, acting as a refreshment post, refitting harbour and market town for the rural hinterland. In the absence of a pliable indigenous population the mainstay of its labour force was slavery. Historians have long recognized the diverse regions of the Indian Ocean world from which slaves were obtained, but precise enumeration of the town’s enslaved population has been hampered by sources that combine the urban population with the rural hinterland. This paper uses new data obtained from household inventories to show how the main sources of Cape Town’s slave population shifted from South Asia in the early parts of the century, to Southeast Asia and then to the Southwest Indian Ocean and especially eastern Africa by the time of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The paper then argues that both the Indian and the African roots of Cape Town’s slave heritage have been obscured by the strong emphasis in popular perception and memory on ‘Malay’ slaves from Southeast Asia and analyses the political dynamics behind such a distortion.

John McKenzie and Nigel Dalziel (eds) Encyclopaedia of Empire

C.Strange, R.Cribb and C.Forth (eds), Honour, violence and emotions in history, 2014

No-one will want to deny that it is the most grievous offence that can be done to an upright and ... more No-one will want to deny that it is the most grievous offence that can be done to an upright and right-minded person when one's honour and reputation is damaged by people who cannot master their own unbridled passions since, in accordance with calm and rational understanding and natural reasoning, there is nothing more precious or valuable after life itself than the maintenance of honour and reputation.