In a broader project, I work on topics related to slavery and the experience of the enslaved at the Cape in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

In earlier research, I focussed on runaway enslaved people who deserted their owners, evading recapture for days or even years. Through a full series of court sentences complemented by a selection of trial records, my chapter ‘Just Deserters’ (2016) shows the role of crime, work, ethnic background and social interaction in facilitating both escape and recapture in the eighteenth-century Cape.

In the 2021 article ‘When Cape Slavery Ended’ (co-authored with Johan Fourie, Lisa Martin and Hans Heese) we provided a wide-ranging look at the enslaved population at the time of emancipation, made possible by the detailed, individual level records generated in the process of emancipation.

The first decades of the nineteenth-century saw the introduction of newspapers into the Colony. The South African Commercial Advertiser, De Zuid-Afrikaan, the Grahamstown Journal and the government’s own publication – The Government Gazette – provide another window through which to view historical slavery. Using advertisements placed for sales of enslaved people, Wouter Raaijmakers and I showed the potential for using advertisements in quantitative history of the Cape and through analysis of the timing and content of the ads themselves, traced the patterns in slave sales in the early 1830s. During that period it was still legal to buy and sell enslaved people in the Cape colony, despite the 1807 Abolition of the slave trade. Our work was published in Quantitative History and Uncharted People.

At the Cape, manumission through self-purchase was a route to free status. During the Dutch East India Company period, manumission by (self)purchase was not a civil right as it was in parts of the Atlantic World. Legislation changes in the nineteenth-century, by which time the Cape had been conquered by the British and drawn into the British empire, meant that at least in theory the enslaved had the opportunity to purchase their freedom from masters. I am currently working on a series of articles on manumission practices in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony which draw attention to the ways in which enslaved people achieved freedom, if relative and constrained, in the years before de jure emancipation (1834).