Speaking for the slave: Britain and the Cape, 1751-1838
Postcolonial studies has asked the question "Can the subaltern speak? ", but has focused less strongly on the strategies by which the subaltern is prevented from securing a hearing. The textual and social strategies used to prevent Cape slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from voicing their plight have been neglected, though both pro- and anti-slavery lobbyists were eloquent. To present the slave as one whose inferiority rendered him incapable of pleading his cause was a device of the pro-slavery group; to pretend that consultation was impossible was another, though people who offered this defence were often surrounded by slaves. Others, accepting and profiting from the inequalities of a class-stratified society, were unable to perceive any but the extreme experiences of an unfree condition as constituting injustice. Anti-slavery campaigners were rarely in favour of the slave's being consulted: they preferred to condemn their political rivals, the slave-owners. Abolition found many of them searching for arguments to maintain the inequalities of society, and especially to prevent former serfs from securing a hearing.
Degrees of Freedom: Lady Anne Barnard's Cape Diaries
During the whole period of her absence from England, that is, from the beginning of 1797 until May 1802, Lady Anne Barnard appears to have kept diaries of her activities and observations. Her husband, Andrew Barnard, had been appointed Secretary of the Cape Colony in the first British civil administration, under the governorship, in the first two years, of Lord Macartney, and she, unusually for a woman of her class and time, accompanied him to Cape Town. These first years, 1797 and 1798, were happy for the Barnards, who found Lord Macartney friendly and sympathetic. As Lady Macartney remained in London, Lady Anne became official hostess to the administration, and Macartney's letters to her after his departure from the Cape suggest that he had much in common with this intelligent, socially experienced and well-judging woman. Her friendliness and social skills enabled her to secure the goodwill of many of the Cape Dutch. Late in 1798, Macartney, elderly and in poor health, was given permission to return to England. His departure marked the end of the happiest part of the Barnards' stay at the Cape, since the Acting Governor who succeeded him, Major-General Francis Dundas (nephew of the Minister for War and the Colonies, Henry Dundas) and the second governor, Sir George Yonge, who arrived in December 1799, were not particularly friendly with the Barnards, nor could the Barnards regard either of these men with the admiration and affection which they had felt for Macartney. Lady Anne, rereading her diaries in her old age, did not feel that those of 1799-1802 were of interest to readers, probably because it was a less happy period, and also, perhaps, because the element of novelty in her experience was less. She revised the diaries which she had kept in 1797-78, the period of Macartney's governorship, turning them
Women and Politics in Early Tudor England
Political historians working on the early Tudor period have traditionally concentrated on institutions – monarchy, council, parliament, courts, and administrative bodies – that excluded women. The very definition of politics underlying the dominant historiography has thus made it seem both natural and inevitable to write history as if the world of high politics, the world that really counted, were exclusively male.