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Chapter 3 - The Border of Trust at Kat River for Coloured Settlers, 1851–1853
- Edited by David Boucher, Cardiff University, Ayesha Omar, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Book:
- Decolonisation
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2023, pp 75-102
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Summary
Decolonisation has proved a productive trope for critique over the past decade of the epistemic injustice of exclusionary Eurocentric hegemony in the Western academy, and for inclusion of alternative, heterogeneous and diverse voices. Whereas this rapid uptake of decolonial research gives the impression that the project began recently, we should remember that the struggle for decolonisation is practically coterminous with colonisation. The legacy of colonialism influences the struggle for decolonisation. In the drive to epistemic decolonisation, we must be careful not to dismiss the contributions of those who left this legacy behind, nor to repeat their errors. The tale presented in this chapter of colonial loyalty, of the coloured missionary settler, James Read Jr (1811–1894), and anti-imperial rebellion, of the coloured colonial settlers of the Kat River Settlement (KRS), reminds us of the complexity of the task. On the one hand, it teaches us to appreciate the value and attraction of colonial ideology for colonised subjects, and how colonial ideology influenced the struggle for decolonisation. On the other hand, we learn not to underestimate the willingness to abandon universalism, and the attraction of decolonisation for imperial powers. The metropole proved suspiciously receptive to decolonisation. Ignorance of such ideological complexity leads to anachronistic misunderstanding of decolonial agency in the history of colonialism. Ignorance of the imperial impetus towards decolonisation may also perpetuate epistemic injustices of colonialism, perversely, through our own efforts to decolonise.
The KRS was established by the British in 1829 as a frontier buffer zone of coloured settlers, between the Cape Colony and the isiXhosaspeaking territories. The Kat River settlers divided sharply over which side to join in the Eighth Frontier War (1850–1853). Only a minority joined the rebellion against the Colony. The local pastor, James Read Jr, who tells the tale we retrieve, was no brave nationalist hero but equally, he was no colonial dupe. Nevertheless, his loyalty to the British during the Kat River Rebellion puts him in a separate category from archetypical liberation leaders. He was a moderate Victorian colonial gentleman who advocated for British sovereignty in the eastern Cape Colony as a basis for Khoisan/coloured rights of citizenship. Had they all followed Read's advice, the Kat River settlers could have remained independent. Instead, greedy white neighbours used the uprising as an excuse to crush the settlement and seize its fertile land.
10 - Predestination
- from Part II - Concepts
- Edited by Randall Lesaffer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Janne E. Nijman, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius
- Published online:
- 03 September 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 September 2021, pp 221-242
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Summary
This chapter investigates Grotius’s broader intellectual involvement with the doctrine of predestination. Grotius deliberately renounced the religious importance of predestination as he called for religious concord in a time of fierce inter-confessional strife in the United Provinces - an endeavour that almost cost him his life. Considering his abhorrence for religious dogmas about divine predestination and human free will, two of his writings, Meletius and Ordinum pietas, display a remarkable restraint on Grotius’s part on the matter. Social and political order was not to be found in unrelenting dogmatic questions of certainty about what Grotius’s viewed as theologically non-essential religious principles. Rather it required a commitment to religious toleration. This chapter argues that Grotius’s involvement in the Dutch predestination debates reveals important philosophical connections between his religious and political ideas and allows for further explication of two central aspects of Grotius’s political theory: natural sociability and the impious hypothesis. From a careful contextualisation of predestination in Grotius’s religious oeuvre, emerges an account of socialisation independent of the predestination question, and establishes the infamous ‘etiamsi daremus’ statement as an obligation device that served his pursuit for religious and political accord.
6 - Vattel, the Balance of Power, and the Moral Justification of War
- from Part II - Concepts
- Edited by Peter Schröder, University College London
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- Book:
- Concepts and Contexts of Vattel's Political and Legal Thought
- Published online:
- 11 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 24 June 2021, pp 123-140
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Summary
Vattel stands among the principal jurists of modern international relations. Yet the balance of power – a policy at the heart of the theory and practise of international relations, and which Edmund Burke, for example, declared central to the ‘common law of Europe’1 – hardly figures at all in Vattel’s magnum opus. The question thus arises: why does it play a relatively insignificant role in his writings, and what role exactly does he think it plays? There is no doubt that he recognises it as an important element of policy in European relations. While the condition of a balance of power ideally maintains peace and harmony among states, it also carries within itself a powerful justification for preventive war. Balance of power is defined by the principle of collective security that prevents any states from attaining a preponderance of power and constituting a danger to the rest. Yet while this dynamic may ultimately limit the occurrence of war, as just war theory more generally seeks to do,2 any attempt to wage war to preserve the balance of power is predicated on the institutionalisation of war as an instrument of policy. Vattel is thus sceptical of its efficacy as a reliable mechanism for the limitation of war. Whoever ‘entertains a true idea of war … and considers its terrible effects’, Vattel writes, would surely agree that it should not be undertaken unless for the best of reasons (LN, III-iii-24).