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How South Africa became part of Asia in the colonial imagination

7 August 2025

Early European colonists at the Cape of Good Hope reimagined southern Africa as part of Asia’s lucrative and complex cultural world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to a new study. The research shows that the Cape was more than just a stopover for ships; it became a place where global ideas, goods, people, and power collided. The research was published in the journal Past & Present on 6 August 2025.
Map (oriented with east at the top), by Pieter Goos (Amsterdam, 1657), showing the coastline of the western half of the Indian Ocean. Image: Allard Pierson collection

The Cape of Good Hope, located in modern-day South Africa, was originally home to the Indigenous Khoekhoe and San peoples. In 1652, it was colonised by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which used it as a supply station for ships traveling between Europe and Asia. But over the next century, something more subtle and ambitious happened.

'Western edge of the East Indies'

‘The Dutch and other Europeans didn’t just see the Cape as part of Africa, they started to think of it as the western edge of the East Indies,’ explains Dr Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh, the study’s author and a historian at the University of Amsterdam.

Maps from the time - along with travel writing, botanical drawings, and even porcelain plates - began placing the Cape within the East Indies, a term that typically referred to places like Indonesia, India, and China. Why? Because the Dutch were importing Asian plants, enslaved people, and goods to the Cape, and in doing so, they began reshaping the region’s identity in both appearance and meaning.

Chinese gardeners and Asian crops

The study shows that this transformation was not accidental. Dutch settlers, including the first colonial commander Jan van Riebeeck, actively wanted to replicate aspects of Asia in Africa. They tried to import Chinese gardeners, planted Asian crops, and used enslaved workers from across the Indian Ocean. The goal was to make the Cape look and feel like the East Indies.

But it wasn’t just the Dutch who shaped this vision. French Jesuit missionaries, German naturalists, and Chinese artisans all contributed, knowingly or not, to reinforcing this global identity. For example, Cantonese artists created porcelain plates showing Cape Town in Chinese artistic styles, complete with traditional ‘lucky clouds’. And Jesuit scientists staying at the Cape built a temporary observatory that Europeans imagined as looking Chinese, helping to reinforce the idea that the colony was part of Asia.

Porcelain plate, made in eighteenth-century Canton, showing Cape Town’s land- and seascape. Image: William Fehr Collection, Iziko Museums of South Africa

At the same time, Indigenous people at the Cape didn’t stand idly by. Some Khoekhoe leaders, like Autshumato and Krotoa, used their knowledge of both African and European cultures to navigate - and sometimes manipulate - the colonial world. Others, like Doman, traveled to Java, witnessed Dutch colonial brutality in the East Indies, and brought that knowledge back to organize resistance at home.

‘This was a moment of intense worldmaking,’ says Giovannetti-Singh. ‘Both the Dutch and their rivals were literally remapping Africa - not just on paper, but through plants, people, and ideas.’

New visions of the world

The research also shows how deeply global trade and empire shaped local identities. Even the Cape’s natural environment was transformed to fit European fantasies of Asian abundance, as seen in the Company Gardens and imported luxury goods.

As conversations around colonial legacies continue in South Africa and beyond, this study adds a new layer of understanding. It reminds us that colonialism was not just about political control, it was about creating entirely new visions of the world, with lasting impacts on how people, places and cultures are understood today.

Publication details

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh, 'Colonial world-making and global knowledges at the early modern Cape of Good Hope', in Past & Present; https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaf018