Quantifying colonial newspapers : a case study of the internal slave trade at the Cape, 1830-34

Author / Creator

Raaijmakers, Wouter, author

Available as

Online

Summary

The prospects of colonial newspaper research seem endless. Newspapers offer a wide variety of qualitative content, with many more quantitative avenues of research to boot. Everything from the edito...

The prospects of colonial newspaper research seem endless. Newspapers offer a wide variety of qualitative content, with many more quantitative avenues of research to boot. Everything from the editors, editorials, and advertisements provides rich descriptions or opinions of contemporary events at regional, national, and international levels. Colonial newspapers bring even more to the table with heightened tensions and skewed power relations between social groups, only a few of whom are offered a voice in a particular paper. With these many confluent conditions, the pitfalls seem endless. This research explores both the prospects and pitfalls of colonial newspaper research. It applies a mixed-method approach to De Zuid-Afrikaan. This newspaper voiced an Afrikaner, pro-slavery sentiment while reporting on a wide range of issues. More specifically, this research explores slave-sale advertisements, elaborates on the possible categorisation, demonstrates how to extract relevant data, and presents and interprets the resultant figures. In doing so, it answers if, and if so, how and why the newspaper brokered the internal slave trade of Cape society.

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