Afrikaner religious intensification tracked Dutch imperial decline and economic depression.

Evidence

By the closing decade of the eighteenth century, then, the Dutch at the Cape – even and perhaps especially at the frontier – had become visibly more religious and more pious, drawn no doubt to the apocalyptic millenarian appeal of late-century predictions. Dutch colonial and economic power had slipped seriously, and global power was shifting to the burgeoning British. The French Revolution was followed immediately by a period of unrest, at the Cape as in Europe, leading to increased French shipping activity around the Cape, including expanded slave trading, and to French invasion of the Netherlands in the mid-1790s. Following an economic surge in the 1780s, the economy of the Cape had become deeply depressed by the early 1790s, and the Dutch East Indies Company fell into bankruptcy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1389

Categorization

• XREF: Status threat (declining imperial power, depression, bankrupt company) precedes intensified millenarian identity closure — supports threatened-privilege as causal antecedent across contexts. — connects to: Boer racism is a pre-ideological reaction to desperate colonial conditions — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 509; Threatened Afrikaner interests produced organized collective political struggle; Threatened privilege drove Dutch colonists into a homogenizing white Afrikaner identity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1382 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Anticipatory threat of mixture forged Afrikaner ethnic mobilization and racial theology. #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1383
• Boer racism is a pre-ideological reaction to desperate colonial conditions #qualifies (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 509
• Threatened privilege drove Dutch colonists into a homogenizing white Afrikaner identity #qualifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1382
• Religious nationalism intensifies during social crises regardless of demographic religious decline #exemplifies (0.80) — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 197
• Declining ex-imperial societies scapegoat minorities to explain their problems #corroborates (0.80)
• Threatened Afrikaner interests produced organized collective political struggle #corroborates (0.78)