Reading authors of the Enlightenment at the Cape of Good Hope from the late 1780s to the mid 1830s

Abstract

With few exceptions, the study of intellectual traditions in South Africa generally ignores their material traces. The embodiment of ideas and languages in books, pamphlets, newspapers and other media does, however, matter. An analysis of the inventories and catalogues of private book collections, subscription libraries and book sales, of minutes of a reading society, and of newspaper articles and advertisements reveals that Enlightenment authors were not unknown at the Cape in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This article explains how their works were collected, circulated and read, unearthing the material traces of Enlightenment ideas, so that it becomes possible to source some of the Enlightenment print culture origins of Cape liberalism.