Union of South Africa
The Union of South Africa is the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into being on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the Cape Colony, the Natal Colony, the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, it included the territories that were a part of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Following the First World War, the Union of South Africa was granted the administration of South West Africa as a League of Nations mandate, it became treated in most respects as another province of the Union, but it never was formally annexed. Like Canada and Australia, the Union of South Africa was a self-governing autonomous dominion of the British Empire, its independence from the United Kingdom was confirmed in the Balfour Declaration 1926 and the Statute of Westminster 1931. It was governed under a form of constitutional monarchy, with the Crown being represented by a governor-general; the Union came to an end with the enactment of the constitution of 1961, by which it became a republic and temporarily left the Commonwealth.
The Union of South Africa was a unitary state, rather than a federation like Canada and Australia, with each colony's parliaments being abolished and replaced with provincial councils. A bicameral parliament was created, consisting of the House of Assembly and Senate, with members of the parliament being elected by the country's white minority. During the course of the Union, the franchise changed on several occasions always to suit the needs of the government of the day. Parliamentary supremacy was a convention of the constitution, inherited from the United Kingdom. Owing to disagreements over where the Union's capital should be, a compromise was reached in which every province would be dealt a share of the benefits of the capital: the administration would be seated in Pretoria, Parliament would be in Cape Town, the Appellate Division would be in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg were given financial compensation; the Union remained under the British Crown as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.
With the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the Union and other dominions became equal in status to the United Kingdom and it could no longer legislate on behalf of them. The Monarch was represented in South Africa by a Governor-General, while effective power was exercised by the Executive Council, headed by the Prime Minister. Louis Botha a Boer general, was appointed first Prime Minister of the Union, heading a coalition representing the white Afrikaner and English-speaking British diaspora communities. Prosecutions before courts were instituted in the name of the Crown and government officials served in the name of the Crown. An entrenched clause in the Constitution mentioned Dutch and English as official languages of the Union, but the meaning of Dutch was changed by the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 to include both Dutch and Afrikaans. Most English-speaking whites in South Africa supported the United Party of Jan Smuts, which favoured close relations with the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
Unlike the Afrikaans-speaking National Party, which had held anti-British sentiments, was opposed to South Africa's intervention in the Second World War. Some Nationalist organisations, like the Ossewa Brandwag, were supportive of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Most English-speaking South Africans were opposed to the creation of a republic, many of them voting "no" in the 5 October 1960 referendum, but due to the much larger number of Afrikaans-speaking voters, the referendum passed, leading to the establishment of a republic in 1961. The Afrikaner-dominated Government withdrew South Africa from the Commonwealth. Following the results of the referendum, some whites in Natal, which had an English-speaking majority, called for secession from the Union. Five years earlier, some 33,000 Natalians had signed the Natal Covenant in opposition to the plans for a republic. Subsequently, the National Party government had passed a Constitution that repealed the South Africa Act; the features of the Union were carried over with little change to the newly formed Republic.
The decision to transform from a Union to Republic was narrowly decided in the referendum. The decision together with the South African Government's insistence on adhering to its policy of apartheid resulted in South Africa's de facto expulsion from the Commonwealth of Nations; the South Africa Act dealt with race in two specific provisions. First it entrenched the liberal Cape Qualified Franchise system of the Cape Colony which operated free of any racial considerations; the Cape Prime Minister at the time, John X. Merriman, fought hard, but unsuccessfully, to extend this system of multi-racial franchise to the rest of South Africa. Second it made "native affairs" a matter for the national government; the practice therefore was to establish a Minister of Native Affairs. According to Stephen Howe, colonialism in some cases—most among white minorities in South Africa—meant that these violent settlers wanted to maintain more racial inequalities than the colonial empire found just. Several previous unsuccessful attempts to unite the colonies were made, with proposed political models ranging from unitary, to loosely federal.
Sir George Grey, the Governor of Cap
Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, was a British Conservative Party statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. Dubbed "Supermac", he was known for his pragmatism and unflappability. Macmillan served in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, he was wounded three times, most in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. He spent the rest of the war in a military hospital unable to walk, suffered pain and partial immobility for the rest of his life. After the war Macmillan joined his family business entered Parliament at the 1924 general election for the northern industrial constituency of Stockton-on-Tees. After losing his seat in 1929, he regained it in 1931, soon after which he spoke out against the high rate of unemployment in Stockton-On-Tees, against appeasement. Rising to high office during the Second World War as a protégé of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Macmillan served as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Churchill's successor Sir Anthony Eden.
When Eden resigned in 1957 following the Suez Crisis, Macmillan succeeded him as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. As a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition, haunted by memories of the Great Depression, he believed in the post-war settlement and the necessity of a mixed economy, championing a Keynesian strategy of public investment to maintain demand and pursuing corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. Benefiting from favourable international conditions, he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high—if uneven—growth. In his Bedford speech of July 1957 he told the nation they had'never had it so good', but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s; the Conservatives were re-elected in 1959 with an increased majority. In international affairs, Macmillan rebuilt the Special Relationship with the United States from the wreckage of the Suez Crisis, redrew the world map by decolonising sub-Saharan Africa.
Reconfiguring the nation's defences to meet the realities of the nuclear age, he ended National Service, strengthened the nuclear forces by acquiring Polaris, pioneered the Nuclear Test Ban with the United States and the Soviet Union. Belatedly recognising the dangers of strategic dependence, he sought a new role for Britain in Europe, but his unwillingness to disclose United States nuclear secrets to France contributed to a French veto of the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community. Near the end of his premiership, his government was rocked by the Vassall and Profumo scandals, which to some the rebellious youth of the 1960s, seemed to symbolise the moral decay of the British establishment. After his resignation, Macmillan lived out a long retirement as an elder statesman, he was as trenchant a critic of his successors in his old age as he had been of his predecessors in his youth. Macmillan was the last British prime minister born during the Victorian era, the last to have served in the First World War and the last to receive a hereditary peerage.
At the time of his death, he was the longest-lived prime minister in British history, a record surpassed by James Callaghan on 14 February 2005. Macmillan was born at 52 Cadogan Place in Chelsea, London, to Maurice Crawford Macmillan, a publisher, his wife, the former Helen Artie Tarleton Belles, an artist and socialite from Spencer, Indiana, he had two brothers, eight years his senior, Arthur, four years his senior. His paternal grandfather, Daniel MacMillan, who founded Macmillan Publishers, was the son of a Scottish crofter from the Isle of Arran, he considered himself a Scot. Macmillan received an intensive early education guided by his American mother, he learned French at home every morning from a succession of nursery maids, exercised daily at Mr Macpherson's Gymnasium and Dancing Academy, around the corner from the family home. From the age of six or seven he received introductory lessons in classical Latin and Greek at Mr Gladstone's day school, close by in Sloane Square. Macmillan attended Oxford.
He was Third Scholar at Eton College, but his time there was blighted by recurrent illness, starting with a near-fatal attack of pneumonia in his first half. He won an exhibition to Balliol College, but was less of a scholar than his elder brother Dan; as a child and young man, he was an admirer of the policies and leadership of a succession of Liberal Prime Ministers, starting with Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who came to power toward the end of 1905 when Macmillan was only 11 years old, H. H. Asquith, whom he described as having "intellectual sincerity and moral nobility", of Asquith's successor, David Lloyd George, whom he regarded as a "man of action" to accomplish his goals. Macmillan went up to Balliol College in 1912, his political opinions at this stage were an eclectic mix of moderate Conservatism, moderate Liberalism and Fabian Socialism. He read avidly about Disraeli, but was particularly impressed by a speech by Lloyd George at the Oxford Union Society in 1913, where he had become a member and debater.
Macmillan was a protégé of the President Walter Monckton a Cabinet colleague.
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, protectorates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It originated with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the world population at the time, by 1920, it covered 35,500,000 km2, 24% of the Earth's total land area; as a result, its political, legal and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" was used to describe the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant that the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, in the process established large overseas empires.
Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England and following union between England and Scotland in 1707, Great Britain, the dominant colonial power in North America, it became the dominant power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The independence of the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1783 after the American War of Independence caused Britain to lose some of its oldest and most populous colonies. British attention soon turned towards Asia and the Pacific. After the defeat of France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain emerged as the principal naval and imperial power of the 19th century. Unchallenged at sea, British dominance was described as Pax Britannica, a period of relative peace in Europe and the world during which the British Empire became the global hegemon and adopted the role of global policeman.
In the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to transform Britain. The British Empire expanded to include most of India, large parts of Africa and many other territories throughout the world. Alongside the formal control that Britain exerted over its own colonies, its dominance of much of world trade meant that it controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. During the 19th century, Britain's population increased at a dramatic rate, accompanied by rapid urbanisation, which caused significant social and economic stresses. To seek new markets and sources of raw materials, the British government under Benjamin Disraeli initiated a period of imperial expansion in Egypt, South Africa, elsewhere. Canada and New Zealand became self-governing dominions. By the start of the 20th century and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Subsequent military and economic tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied upon its empire.
The conflict placed enormous strain on the military and manpower resources of Britain. Although the British Empire achieved its largest territorial extent after World War I, Britain was no longer the world's pre-eminent industrial or military power. In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East and Southeast Asia were occupied by Japan. Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige helped to accelerate the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence as part of a larger decolonisation movement in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire; the Suez Crisis confirmed Britain's decline as a global power. The transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997 marked for many the end of the British Empire. Fourteen overseas territories remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states.
The United Kingdom is now one of 16 Commonwealth nations, a grouping known informally as the Commonwealth realms, that share a monarch Queen Elizabeth II. The foundations of the British Empire were laid when Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after the European discovery of America, but he made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, mistakenly believing that he had reached Asia, there was no attempt to found a colony. Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but nothing was heard of his ships again. No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. In the meantime, the 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals had declared "that this realm of England is an Empire".
The subsequent Protestant Reformation turned Catholic Spain into implacable enemies. In 1562, the English Crown encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa with the aim of breaking into the Atlantic slave tr
Ontario
Ontario is one of the 13 provinces and territories of Canada and is located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province accounting for 38.3 percent of the country's population, is the second-largest province in total area. Ontario is fourth-largest jurisdiction in total area when the territories of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are included, it is home to the nation's capital city and the nation's most populous city, Ontario's provincial capital. Ontario is bordered by the province of Manitoba to the west, Hudson Bay and James Bay to the north, Quebec to the east and northeast, to the south by the U. S. states of Minnesota, Ohio and New York. All of Ontario's 2,700 km border with the United States follows inland waterways: from the west at Lake of the Woods, eastward along the major rivers and lakes of the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence River drainage system; these are the Rainy River, the Pigeon River, Lake Superior, the St. Marys River, Lake Huron, the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River, Lake Erie, the Niagara River, Lake Ontario and along the St. Lawrence River from Kingston, Ontario, to the Quebec boundary just east of Cornwall, Ontario.
There is only about 1 km of land border made up of portages including Height of Land Portage on the Minnesota border. Ontario is sometimes conceptually divided into Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario; the great majority of Ontario's population and arable land is in the south. In contrast, the larger, northern part of Ontario is sparsely populated with cold winters and heavy forestation; the province is named after Lake Ontario, a term thought to be derived from Ontarí:io, a Huron word meaning "great lake", or skanadario, which means "beautiful water" in the Iroquoian languages. Ontario has about 250,000 freshwater lakes; the province consists of three main geographical regions: The thinly populated Canadian Shield in the northwestern and central portions, which comprises over half the land area of Ontario. Although this area does not support agriculture, it is rich in minerals and in part covered by the Central and Midwestern Canadian Shield forests, studded with lakes and rivers. Northern Ontario is subdivided into two sub-regions: Northeastern Ontario.
The unpopulated Hudson Bay Lowlands in the extreme north and northeast swampy and sparsely forested. Southern Ontario, further sub-divided into four regions. Despite the absence of any mountainous terrain in the province, there are large areas of uplands within the Canadian Shield which traverses the province from northwest to southeast and above the Niagara Escarpment which crosses the south; the highest point is Ishpatina Ridge at 693 metres above sea level in Temagami, Northeastern Ontario. In the south, elevations of over 500 m are surpassed near Collingwood, above the Blue Mountains in the Dundalk Highlands and in hilltops near the Madawaska River in Renfrew County; the Carolinian forest zone covers most of the southwestern region of the province. The temperate and fertile Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Valley in the south is part of the Eastern Great Lakes lowland forests ecoregion where the forest has now been replaced by agriculture and urban development. A well-known geographic feature is part of the Niagara Escarpment.
The Saint Lawrence Seaway allows navigation to and from the Atlantic Ocean as far inland as Thunder Bay in Northwestern Ontario. Northern Ontario occupies 87 percent of the surface area of the province. Point Pelee is a peninsula of Lake Erie in southwestern Ontario, the southernmost extent of Canada's mainland. Pelee Island and Middle Island in Lake Erie extend farther. All are south of 42°N – farther south than the northern border of California; the climate of Ontario varies by location. It is affected by three air sources: cold, arctic air from the north; the effects of these major air masses on temperature and precipitation depend on latitude, proximity to major bodies of water and to a small extent, terrain relief. In general, most of Ontario's climate is classified as humid continental. Ontario has three main climatic regions; the surrounding Great Lakes influence the climatic region of southern Ontario. During the fall and winter months, heat stored from the lakes is released, moderating the climate near the shores of the lakes.
This gives some parts of southern Ontario milder winters than mid-continental areas at lower latitudes. Parts of Southwestern Ontario have a moderate humid continental climate, similar to that of the inland Mid-Atlantic states and the Great Lakes portion of the Midwestern United States; the region has warm to cold winters. Annual precipitation is well distributed throughout the year. Most of this region lies in the lee of the Great Lakes. In December 2010, the snowbelt set a new record when it was h
Patriotism
Patriotism or national pride is the feeling of love and sense of attachment to a homeland and alliance with other citizens who share the same sentiment. This attachment can be a combination of many different feelings relating to one's own homeland, including ethnic, political or historical aspects, it encompasses a set of concepts related to, but mutually exclusive from those of nationalism. Some manifestations of patriotism emphasise the "land" element in love for one's native land and use the symbolism of agriculture and the soil – compare Blut und Boden. An excess of patriotism in the defense of a nation is called chauvinism; the English term patriot is first attested in the Elizabethan era. The abstract noun patriotism appears in the early 18th century; the general notion of civic virtue and group dedication has been attested in culture globally throughout the historical period. For the Enlightenment thinkers of 18th-century Europe, loyalty to the state was chiefly considered in contrast to loyalty to the Church.
It was argued that clerics should not be allowed to teach in public schools since their patrie was heaven, so that they could not inspire love of the homeland in their students. One of the most influential proponents of this classical notion of patriotism was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Enlightenment thinkers criticized what they saw as the excess of patriotism. In 1774, Samuel Johnson published a critique of what he viewed as false patriotism. On the evening of 7 April 1775, he made the famous statement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." James Boswell, who reported this comment in his Life of Johnson, does not provide context for the quote, it has therefore been argued that Johnson was in fact attacking the false use of the term "patriotism" by contemporaries such as John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute and his supporters. However, there is no direct evidence to contradict the held belief that Johnson's famous remark was a criticism of patriotism itself. Patriotism may be strengthened by adherence to a national religion.
This is the opposite of the separation of church and state demanded by the Enlightenment thinkers who saw patriotism and faith as similar and opposed forces. Michael Billig and Jean Bethke Elshtain have both argued that the difference between patriotism and faith is difficult to discern and relies on the attitude of the one doing the labelling. Christopher Heath Wellman, professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, describes that a popular view of the "patriotist" position is robust obligations to compatriots and only minimal samaritan responsibilities to foreigners. Wellman calls this position "patriotist" rather than "nationalist" to single out the members of territorial, political units rather than cultural groups. George Orwell, in his influential essay Notes on Nationalism distinguished patriotism from the related concept of nationalism: "By'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.
Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power; the abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality." "It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind." Marxists have taken various stances regarding patriotism. On one hand, Karl Marx famously stated that "The working men have no country" and that "the supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster." The same view is promoted by present-day Trotskyists such as Alan Woods, "in favour of tearing down all frontiers and creating a socialist world commonwealth."On the other hand and Maoists are in favour of socialist patriotism based on the theory of socialism in one country. In the European Union, thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas have advocated a "Euro-patriotism", but patriotism in Europe is directed at the nation-state and more than not coincides with "Euroscepticism".
Several surveys have tried to measure patriotism for various reasons, such as the Correlates of War project which found some correlation between war propensity and patriotism. The results from different studies are time dependent. For example, patriotism in Germany before World War I ranked at or near the top, whereas today it ranks at or near the bottom of patriotism surveys. Since 1981, the World Values Survey explores people's national values and beliefs and refer to the average answer "for high income residents" of a country to the question "Are you proud to be?". It ranges from 1 to 4. Charles Blatberg, From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-829688-6. Craig Calhoun, Is it Time to Be Postnational?, in Ethnicity and Minority Rights, Stephen May, Tariq Modood and Judith Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Pp. 231–56. Paul Gomberg, “Patriotism is Like Racism,” in Igor Primoratz, ed. Patriotism, Humanity Books, 2002, pp. 105–12.
ISBN 1-57392-955-7. Jürgen Habermas, “Appendix II: Citizenship and National Identity,” in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Cape Colony
The Cape of Good Hope known as the Cape Colony, was a British colony in present-day South Africa, named after the Cape of Good Hope. The British colony was preceded by an earlier Dutch colony of the same name, the Kaap de Goede Hoop, established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company; the Cape was under Dutch rule from 1652 to 1795 and again from 1803 to 1806. The Dutch lost the colony to Great Britain following the 1795 Battle of Muizenberg, but had it returned following the 1802 Peace of Amiens, it was re-occupied by the UK following the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, British possession affirmed with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. The Cape of Good Hope remained in the British Empire, becoming self-governing in 1872, uniting with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910, it was renamed the Province of the Cape of Good Hope. South Africa became a sovereign state in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster. In 1961 it obtained its own monetary unit called the Rand. Following the 1994 creation of the present-day South African provinces, the Cape Province was partitioned into the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Western Cape, with smaller parts in North West province.
The Cape of Good Hope was coextensive with the Cape Province, stretching from the Atlantic coast inland and eastward along the southern coast, constituting about half of modern South Africa: the final eastern boundary, after several wars against the Xhosa, stood at the Fish River. In the north, the Orange River known as the Gariep River, served as the boundary for some time, although some land between the river and the southern boundary of Botswana was added to it. From 1878, the colony included the enclave of Walvis Bay and the Penguin Islands, both in what is now Namibia. An expedition of the Dutch East India Company led by Jan van Riebeeck established a trading post and naval victualing station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Van Riebeeck's objective was to secure a harbour of refuge for Dutch ships during the long voyages between Europe and Asia. Within about three decades, the Cape had become home to a large community of "vrijlieden" known as "vrijburgers", former VOC employees who settled in Dutch colonies overseas after completing their service contracts.
Vrijburgers were married Dutch citizens who undertook to spend at least twenty years farming the land within the fledgling colony's borders. Reflecting the multi-national nature of the early trading companies, the Dutch granted vrijburger status to a number of former Scandinavian and German employees as well. In 1688 they sponsored the immigration of nearly two hundred French Huguenot refugees who had fled to the Netherlands upon the Edict of Fontainebleau. There was a degree of cultural assimilation due to intermarriage, the universal adoption of the Dutch language. Many of the colonists who settled directly on the frontier became independent and localised in their loyalties. Known as Boers, they migrated westwards beyond the Cape Colony's initial borders and had soon penetrated a thousand kilometres inland; some Boers adopted a nomadic lifestyle permanently and were denoted as trekboers. The Dutch colonial period was marred by a number of bitter conflicts between the colonists and the Khoisan, followed by the Xhosa, both of which they perceived as unwanted competitors for prime farmland.
Dutch traders imported thousands of slaves to the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East Indies and other parts of Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century the Cape's population swelled to about 26,000 people of European descent and 30,000 slaves. In 1795, France occupied the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands, the mother country of the Dutch East India Company; this prompted Great Britain to occupy the territory in 1795 as a way to better control the seas in order to stop any potential French attempt to reach India. The British sent a fleet of nine warships which anchored at Simon's Town and, following the defeat of the Dutch militia at the Battle of Muizenberg, took control of the territory; the Dutch East India Company transferred its territories and claims to the Batavian Republic in 1798, ceased to exist in 1799. Improving relations between Britain and Napoleonic France, its vassal state the Batavian Republic, led the British to hand the Cape of Good Hope over to the Batavian Republic in 1803, under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens.
In 1806, the Cape, now nominally controlled by the Batavian Republic, was occupied again by the British after their victory in the Battle of Blaauwberg. The temporary peace between Britain and Napoleonic France had crumbled into open hostilities, whilst Napoleon had been strengthening his influence on the Batavian Republic; the British, who set up a colony on 8 January 1806, hoped to keep Napoleon out of the Cape, to control the Far East trade routes. In 1814 the Dutch government formally ceded sovereignty over the Cape to the British, under the terms of the Convention of London; the British started to settle the eastern border of the colony, with the arrival in Port Elizabeth of the 1820 Settlers. They began to introduce the first rudimentary rights for the Cape's black African population and, in 1834, abolished slavery; the resentment that the Dutch farmers felt against this social change, as well as the imposition of English language and culture, caused them to trek inland en masse. This was known as the Great Trek, the migrating Boers settled inland, forming the "Boer republics" of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
British immigration con
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