The Thousand Generation Covenant: Dutch Reformed Covenant Theology and Group Identity in Colonial South Africa, 1652-1814
The Thousand Generation Covenant: Dutch Reformed Covenant Theology and Group Identity in Colonial South Africa, 1652-1814

Author: Gerstner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 900447708X

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This study presents the religious factor in the development of a separatistic group identity among the forebears of the Afrikaners during the Dutch colonial period of South African history. Dutch Reformed covenant theology and baptism practice rooted in the thousand generation covenant theory helped to shape this self-understanding. It traces the basic developments of covenant theology in the Netherlands during the period and demonstrates how these concepts were conveyed to colonial South Africa. The dominant strain of covenantal thought treated the entire community as redeemed and called to be separate. It was presented through a variety of means through which virtually every colonist was exposed. This study offers a balanced historical approach to the role of theological concepts in the colonial roots of Afrikaner group identity. It answers traditional scholarship in the field which either directly identify the concepts behind the development of apartheid with Calvinist theology or, more recently, deny that the Reformed faith had any role in the development of apartheid ideology until the twentieth century.

The Company and the Shogun
The Company and the Shogun

Author: Adam Clulow

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0231164289

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The Dutch East India Company was a unique, hybrid organization acting as both company and state, aggressively intervening in Asian political matters in which it had no place. This study focuses on the company’s clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.