The Inn of the Indian Ocean

Early modern travellers dubbed southern Africa’s Cape of Good Hope “the Inn of the Indian Ocean”. This name captured its role in a rapidly globalising world: a place where crews voyaging between Europe and Asia paused to replenish and repair their ships, and exchange information. Established as a Dutch East India Company (VOC) colony in 1652, the Cape soon became one of the world’s most interconnected and diverse—yet violently hierarchical and unequal—settlements, bringing Indigenous Khoikhoi and San people into sustained contact with European settlers and sailors, as well as enslaved labourers from across the Indian Ocean littoral.

Yet, early modern southern Africa remains strikingly marginal in historiographies of the globalisation of knowledge. Influential work on circulation has transformed the global history of science, but the Cape continues to be treated primarily as a logistical maritime stopover. This characterisation obscures the fact that the Cape was connected to a vast hinterland inhabited by Indigenous populations with rich botanical, zoological, and astral knowledge traditions. VOC and missionary sources reveal that early modern Europeans and enslaved “East Indians” were deeply interested in the Khoikhoi and San, and their knowledge of stars, plants, animals, and environments. Despite early modern attention to inland expertise, historians have rarely analysed the Cape as a site where knowledge was produced on the ground, rather than merely gathered en route to and from metropolitan and colonial centres. This oversight is often attributed to a perceived scarcity of sources with which to reconstruct Indigenous and enslaved epistemologies in these encounters. This project will address this imbalance by developing a method of cross-contextualisation, which juxtaposes conventional textual colonial sources with Indigenous oral histories, ethnographies, and material culture.

The aim of this project is to use the Cape to rethink global histories of early modern science by examining how knowledge was produced in port-hinterland colonies that were simultaneously maritime nodes and gateways to extensive inland Indigenous information networks. It was precisely the Cape’s liminal setting that positioned it as a space in which sameness and difference were actively negotiated; a process central to practices of classification, including the unstable definition of imperial categories such as “the East Indies”. Tracing the multicultural encounters that took place at the Cape, the project analyses how new constellations of actors—Indigenous experts, enslaved “East Indian” intermediaries, missionaries, and colonial officials—took shape amid a violent colonial reality, bridging continental African and oceanic colonial networks and producing new knowledges that circulated to European metropoles. The Cape’s distinctive position thus reveals a geopolitical formation that has received little attention to date from historians of science but can illuminate understudied patterns of knowledge co-construction.

By centring the Cape as a contact zone in which enslaved people from across the Indian Ocean interacted with Khoikhoi and San interlocutors and European settlers, the project explores how early modern knowledge emerged through messy, multilateral encounters, including South-South exchanges often overlooked in both colonial and postcolonial historiography. In doing so, the project reframes early modern science not as a body of knowledge transported intact across space, but as a set of practices co-produced through uneven, cross-cultural encounters in colonial port-hinterland settings