Cape Colony

The Cape Colony was the British colony at the southern tip of Africa, named for the Cape of Good Hope, which existed from 1795 to 1910. It began as a Dutch refreshment station: the East India Company founded Cape Town in 1652, and for a century and a half Dutch farmers spread inland. Britain seized the Cape in 1795 to keep it from revolutionary France, returned it at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, retook it in 1806 and had it confirmed by treaty in 1814. Under British rule the colony grew into half of modern South Africa, pushing its eastern frontier to the Fish River through a series of wars with the Xhosa peoples and absorbing the northern interior up to the Orange River. It became self-governing in 1872, and its diamond fields around Kimberley and the politics of Cecil Rhodes made it the richest and most quarrelsome colony in Africa. In 1910 it merged with Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa, living on as the Cape Province within it.