Thirty Years’ War refugees filled the Cape’s early labor force

Evidence

The bulk of new European settlers at the time were German laborers and tradesmen. Fleeing poverty and unemployment as a result of the Thirty Years’ War, they were lured to the most powerful European economy of the day. Their salvation was to sign up with the Dutch East Indies Company for a five-year commitment to work at the Cape, much as French Huguenot families had done to escape anti-Calvinist persecution by Catholic-dominated France in 1688. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1356

Categorization

• XREF: Colonial settlement as refugee relief parallels indentured-labor dynamics studied in Atlantic world history (e.g., Caribbean and Virginia headright systems).
• QUESTION: Worth checking how the German/Huguenot escape-from-persecution framing was later folded into Afrikaner origin mythology as a founding refugee-nation narrative.