This is the first single-volume social history of eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Town. Not only does it consider the elite inhabitants such as the 'expat' officials of the Dutch East India Company and the free burghers but it also includes members of Cape Town's underclasses: soldiers and sailors, artisans, convicts, exiles and freed slaves. At the same time the book positions the town in the wider context of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and stresses its complex connections with Europe, Asia and Africa. It provides a fresh and vibrant understanding of this Dutch colonial town, the lives of its inhabitants, the identities they fashioned for themselves and the cultural landscape they created at the Cape.Contents: NIGEL WORDEN, Introduction ANTONIA MALAN, Cultural landscape ROBERT ROSS/ALICIA SCHRIKKER, The VOC official elite GERALD GROENEWALD, Entrepreneurs and the making of a free-burgher society TEUN BAARTMAN, Protest and Dutch burgher identity KERRY WARD, Southeast Asian migrants JIM ARMSTRONG, The Chinese exiles ROBERT SHELL/ARCHIE DICK, Jan Smiesing, Slave Lodge schoolmaster, 1697 to 1734 SUSAN NEWTON-KING, Family, friendship and survival among freed slaves NIGEL PENN, Soldiers and Cape Town society NIGEL WORDEN, Public brawling, masculinity and honour