SETTLERS, THE STATE AND COLONIAL POWER - THE COLONIZATION OF QUEEN-ADELAIDE PROVINCE, 1834-37

The British annexation of Queen Adelaide Province was the first large scale extension of British authority over Africans since the capture o f the Cape Colony. In recent overviews, it has come to represent the s uccess of expansionist settler capitalist designs in securing colonial government support. Through an analysis of those issues that most con cerned settlers, the state and missionaries on the eastern Cape fronti er in the mid-1830s, this article seeks to qualify this representation by pointing out ambivalences in colonial approaches to the province. Settler and official responses to the issues of land, labour and colon ial security, raised by the annexation of Xhosa territory, are shown t o be contradictory as often as they were reinforcing. Missionaries' re actions to the extension of colonial authority are also revealed to be differentiated in certain respects. As well as considering colonial d ivisions though, the article seeks to go further than existing account s in exploring the nature of British power exercised within the provin ce. It is suggested that far from the annexation marking the impositio n of direct colonial state control, the province's administration was necessarily characterized by accommodation and compromise between offi cials and missionaries, on the one hand, and Xhosa chiefly authority, on the other. Overall, this study indicates that a decisive shift in t he balance of power, in favour of state-sponsored settler capitalism, had not yet occurred by the late 1830s. It has, rather, to be dated to the mid-to-late nineteenth century.