Nigel PENN

The project will consider the nature and significance of the convict system that was created in the British Cape Colony during the 19th century. It will explore the social, political and economic implications of the system and compare it with other convict systems in operation in the British Empire at this time. Particular attention will be paid to the experience of the indigenous people of the Cape who were sentenced to hard labor within the system.

Nigel Penn is a Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa where he obtained his PhD. He specializes in the history of the early colonial Cape, both under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the British, and has a particular interest in frontier history and the history of the Cape’s indigenous people – the Khoisan. He has previously been awarded a fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Colonialism and its Aftermaths at the University of Tasmania in Australia and was awarded a fellowship at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio in 2014 to work on an Australian Research Council project on massacre in the colonial world during the revolutionary period. He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Basle. He is currently one of the editors of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Violence.

PENN, Nigel. Murderers, Miscreants and Mutineers: Early Colonial Cape Lives, Johannesburg, Jacana, 2015, 286 pp.

PENN, Nigel. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century, Athens, Ohio, University of Ohio Press, 2005, 388 pp.

PENN, Nigel. Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth Century Cape Characters, Cape Town-Hilvesum, David Philip-Veloren Publishers, 1999, reprinted 2003, 195 pp.

PENN, Nigel and Delmas, Adrien (eds). Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500-1900, Leiden, Brill, 2012, 364 pp.

PENN, Nigel and Boucher, Maurice (eds). Britain at the Cape, 1795-1803, Johannesburg, Brenthurst Press, 1992, 264 pp.