The meeting hall of the Council of India in Batavia
Compared to the rest of Europe, the social structure of the Netherlands was fluid, unique in the mobility people enjoyed and in the absence of sharp class cleavages. In the province of Holland, Roman-Dutch law, the established form of justice, conferred no special privileges on the nobility, but in the words of the great jurist Voetius, it ‘preserves equality and binds the citizens equally’. It was this law with its egalitarian thrust that would be applied at the Cape.
The Dutch displayed no great deference to religious or secular authorities. There was no strong central state, only a loose confederation of provinces with the Prince of Orange as the symbolic head. The Reformed church, which was the official denomination, was based on Calvinist dogma. Laymen could seek God’s grace and the community of the holy without using anyone as intermediary. The church and its institutions were open to criticism. More than one minister contrasted the lack of respect of Dutch laymen for their ministers with the humble deference displayed by Spanish and Portuguese Roman Catholics towards their priests.
More than elsewhere capitalism had permeated Dutch society, where the aristocracy and landed gentry were much less dominant. People in the Netherlands enjoyed the most individual mobility and the greatest advances in Europe towards the idea of equality before the law. Below the fairly small strata of the aristocracy and the ‘high bourgeoisie’ was a wide stratum of the ‘broad citizenry’ and ‘middle estate’, consisting of skilled artisans, shopkeepers and suppliers of goods. A poor man could aspire to rise up from the proletariat to enter the middestand, the middle class. Citizens in the Netherlands had more liberty to pursue their own interests than elsewhere in Europe.
Most of the immigrants who became free burghers at the Cape were poor, humble and ignorant, but the term ‘burgher’ was the same as that used for those at the centre of the seventeenth-century Dutch world: the prosperous, self-confident burghers of the Dutch cities portrayed in the work of Rembrandt, Steen, Vermeer, Hals and other painters.
The Dutch burgher was not a bourgeois defined by economic function and power but ‘a citizen first and homo economicus second’. The Company servants released at the Cape aspired to the same status as the Dutch burghers, although the high Company officials scoffed at this pretence. In the early seventeenth century the Dutch officials and traders in the East did not display the same degree of cultural chauvinism and racial arrogance that would later be so characteristic of Europeans in the colonies. Europe had not yet undergone its economic and technological revolution. There was little that gave it an edge over the complex societies of the East. Fire power helped, but in the dense populations of the East it was of limited use. Some eastern products, such as textiles, were distinctly better than those the Europeans brought to the market.
In terms of cuisine the East had much to offer the Dutch colonists in the East. Dishes such as bobotie, kebabs, chutney and samosas, together with rice and spices like cinnamon, pepper, cloves, ginger, turmeric and saffron, became part and parcel of the food culture at the Cape.
