ommissioners were sent
out to investigate and frame measures of reform. The measures they
promulgated were, however, deemed inadequate by the more ardent spirits,
and by those especially who dwelt in the outlying districts, where the
government had exerted, and could exert, little control. In 1795, first
at Graaf-Reinet and then at Swellendam, the people rose in revolt, not,
as they stated, against the mother country, but against the Company.
They turned out the landdrosts, and set up miniature republics, each
with a representative assembly.

It would not have been difficult for the government to have reduced
these risings by cutting off supplies of food. But now South Africa was
suddenly swept into the great whirlpool of European politics, and events
were at hand which made these petty local movements insignificant, save
in so far as they were evidences of the independent spirit of the
people.

From 1757, when the battle of Plassey was fought, the English power in
India had been rapidly growing, and the Cape, which they had not cared
to acquire in 1620, had now become in their eyes a station of capital
importance. When war broke out between Britain and Holland in 1781, the
English had attempted to seize the Colony, but retired when they found a
strong French force prepared to aid the Dutch in its defence. Now they
were again at war with Holland, which, over-run by the armies of
revolutionary France, had become the Batavian Republic. In 1795 an
English expedition, bearing orders from the Stadholder of the
Netherlands, then a refugee in England, requiring the Company's officers
to admit them, landed at Simon's Bay, and after some slight resistance
obliged Cape Town and its castle to capitulate. Within a few months the
insurgents at Swellendam and Graaf-Reinet submitted, and British troops
held the Colony till 1802, when it was restored to the Batavian Republic
on the conclusion of the peace of Amiens. Next year, however, war broke
out afresh; and the English government, feeling the extreme importance,
in the great struggle which they were waging with Napoleon, of
possessing a naval stronghold as a half-way house to India, resolved
again to occupy the Cape. In 1806 a strong force was landed in Table
Bay, and after one engagement the Dutch capitulated. In 1814 the English
occupation was turned into permanent sovereignty by a formal cession of
the Colony on the part of the then restored Stadholder, who received for
it and