Colonial racial ideas traveled constantly between Europe and the Cape.

Evidence

Historians who discuss at length whether slavery gives rise to racial rationalization, in the Cape as elsewhere, or whether race may have been formative in the negotiation of social relations from early settlement onwards, restrict their discussions in the very posing of the binary completely to conditions at the Cape. The hold of national history fixes fast. But the counter-conditions cut against this fixation. … Company agents, administrators, arbeiders (workers), and adventurers were coming and going quite frequently between Europe and the colony, and these Europeans no doubt carried with them from metropole to province and back again the latest understandings and representations of racial conception. Ideas travel, as and with the people who do. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1338

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘arbeiders’ (workers) as a Cape Dutch term, and the core methodological image that ‘ideas travel, as and with the people who do’.