Cape Republic: Difference between revisions
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→History: Added a new paragraph to the British occupation of the cape
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While the earliest colonists were, for the most part, from the lower, working-class and displayed an indifferent attitude towards developing the colony, but after a commissioner that was sent out in 1685 to attract more settlers, a more dedicated group of immigrants began to arrive. French refugees began to arrive in the Cape after leaving their country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This small body of immigrants had a marked influence on the character of the Dutch settlers. Owing to the policy instituted in 1701 of the Dutch East India Company which dictated that schools should teach exclusively in Dutch and strict laws of assembly, the Huguenots ceased by the middle of the 18th century to maintain a distinct identity, and the knowledge of French disappeared. By the late 1700s, the Cape Colony was one of the best developed European settlements outside Europe or the Americas.
After the bloody French revolution and the consolidation of the Augustine regime, in 1795 the French Republic invaded the Dutch Republic, and replaced it with a client state, the Batavian Republic. The Dutch stadtholder, Prince of Orange, who had fled to England, refused to recognize the Batavian Republic, and ordered all Dutch colonial governors to surrender to and temporarily accept British authority instead for safekeeping. While there were some who argued to not accept the orders, the majority of Cape colonists (as well as the vast majority of local leaders) were loyal the house of Oranje and two months after receiving the orders the Cape Colony surrendered control to the British (with the explicit promise that the colony to be returned to the House of Oranje eventually). After the particularist revolt in the New Netherland colony in 1796, the British authorities fearing such revolts would spread to other colonies taken for safekeeping from the Dutch Republic declared to local authorities in Kaapstadt that the British crown would under no circumstances annex the Cape colony if British ships were allowed free access to Kaapstad, this agreement is known as the Van Nimwegen declaration (named after the local colonial leader who negotiated the agreement).
=== Rapid expansion & a new identity ===
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