Colonial goodwill decrees failed without institutional enforcement and local backing

Evidence

The Cape administration at times sought to act as neutral judges in such disputes and from time to time asserted the moral insistence to civil treatment of Khoikhoi and Basters. But even in these instances the claims were more often than not undermined by lack of institutionalization and inaction on the part of the administration or its individual agents and aggressive counter-assertion, even violence, on the part of the trekboers and frontiersmen. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pattern of sympathetic colonial administrators’ proclamations being hollow without settlement backing — parallels the ‘governance without teeth’ theme in Milgrom’s law merchant work.
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s infrastructure thesis: moral claims without institutional root structure fail on the frontier.