Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town

Nineteenth-century Cape Town was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa, largely because of the mitigating influences of its more liberal English merchants. Bickford-Smith disagrees: far from being liberal, the English generally shared the racial attitudes of their Afrikaner counterparts. But theirs was a peculiarly English discourse of race, mobilized around a "Clean Party" obsessed with sanitation and the threat of diseases posed by incoming non-white workers in the final years of the century. This original contribution to South African urban history draws on comparative material from other colonial port towns and on relevant studies of the Victorian city.