Talk:British Cape Colony

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Jenks24 (talk) 14:52, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

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Cape Colony → History of Cape Colony – Consider History of New York City, New Amsterdam, and Province of New York as analogous to History of Cape Colony, Dutch Cape Colony and British Cape Colony. Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 12:19, 21 March 2013 (UTC) Brightgalrs (/braɪtˈɡæl.ərˌɛs/)^[1] 09:29, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Merge and Redirect to Cape Province, which was effectively same entity at a later date. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:03, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment: I am strongly opposed to this. The Cape Province inherited the final borders of the Cape Colony, but it was not politically or legally the successor of the Cape Colony - the sovereignty, the legislative powers and the assets of the Cape Colony were transferred to the Union of South Africa in 1910. It's like the difference between the Colony of British Columbia (1866–1871) and the contemporary British Columbia, only more so, because the provinces of Canada retained a lot more independence and continuity of government than the South African provinces ever did. - htonl (talk) 12:58, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
    • I also oppose this for the same reasons. —  AjaxSmack  23:12, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

• Support move. At the moment, History of Cape Colony is a redirect to History of Cape Colony before 1806, which is kind of weird. There ought to be a article at History of Cape Colony that summarises the contents of the four articles in the series: History of Cape Colony before 1806, History of Cape Colony from 1806 to 1870, History of Cape Colony from 1870 to 1899 and History of Cape Colony from the Second Anglo-Boer War. - htonl (talk) 12:58, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

• This is a good idea but with two problems. First, no such article as "History of Cape Colony" currently exists and a simple rename won't change that. Second, there is already duplication between Dutch Cape Colony and History of Cape Colony before 1806 and British Cape Colony and the various other Cape Colony history articles. Having another article would mean triplication. Having said that, I like the idea of a unified (overview or dabconcept) history article and would suggest possibly expanding it to History of Cape Colony and Cape Province to cover all of 1652–1994 (there is currently no History of Cape Province). —  AjaxSmack  23:12, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

Separate article for each administration

The current approach of having a different and separate article for each era of the Cape Colony's history does not make sense, or seem practical. The Cape (like many self-governing colonies) passed through the control of several colonial powers while its internal structure stayed relatively untouched, and also went through great political changes that did not necessarily coincide with the change in colonial overlord. To be consistent therefore, you would need to have a separate article for each political system that the Cape implemented: "The Cape under direct British rule", "The Cape under Representative Government", "the Cape under Responsible Government", etc. These political changes were way greater and deeper than the switch from Dutch to British authority. Obviously having so many articles for one changing political unit would be wasteful and silly.

I propose one article, "Cape Colony", for the political unit, with an infobox that reflects its complex political changes. The article will obviously be predominantly a history section, but a separate "History of the Cape Colony" article could be created, for the huge articles that currently exist broken into time segments.

Either way, having a separate article for every different administration that the colony implemented does not make sense. Abu Shawka (talk) 14:46, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I only see two political entity articles (Dutch Cape Colony and British Cape Colony), hardly excessive for 250 years. There's no reason for "consistency", i.e. the same number of political entity and history articles. Cf. one article on the Soviet Union but five History of the Soviet Union articles. —  AjaxSmack  02:57, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

@AjaxSmack: seconded. @Abu Shawka, I replied the following to you on my talk page:

Hi Abu Shawka. Well, I guess I couldn't disagree more. By your logic, New Netherland should be merged with Province of New York, and Dutch Gold Coast, Danish Gold Coast, Portuguese Gold Coast, Swedish Gold Coast, and Brandenburger Gold Coast should be merged with Gold Coast (British colony). I don't think that will work. Of course the internal structure of the colony did not change overnight after it was taken over from the Dutch by the British, but the change in the administrating colonial power is the principal reason for many of those later changes (e.g. English replacing Dutch as the official language, early abolition of slavery). And of course the evolution of states is a complex process, but few political changes are as momentous as a transfer of sovereignty. That is why colonies have separate articles from contemporary sovereign states and also why colonies changing hands should have separate articles. As Wikipedia expands, some other political changes can split up articles as well (we now have separate articles for the Union of South Africa and for South Africa as we know it today; another example: German Empire, Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, West Germany, and Germany describe various incarnations of the same sovereign state).

As for the term British Cape Colony and Dutch Cape Colony not being generally used: that is just not true. Check this and this list of literature on Google Scholar.

As for having to change the links to either Dutch Gold Coast or British Gold Coast: I have been busy doing that when I split those articles. But then User:BD2412 argued that it doesn't qualify as a disambiguation page, and the page has since been converted into a proper article spanning the entire colonial period of the Cape Colony.

Finally, I have made a call for discussion about splitting the article on the talk page of the then-named article of Cape Colony almost two years ago, and I reopened discussion several times since. I have had exactly zero response. I find it a bit strange that now I have been WP:BOLD, my action is considered controversial.

Fentener van Vlissingen (talk) 10:21, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Okay, well we have a lumper-splitter disagreement then. I'm not a taxonomist but I do know that these disagreements are unending and largely down to perspective/attitude. I think it's clear though, that when there's a relatively high degree of continuity after the new Governor signs the relevant annexation docs, then the change in formal sovereignty is far less important than change in political system for example. A fixation on formal sovereignty might feel neat, but doesn't necessarily reflect any actual changes in the colony. If we consistently follow the splitting policy then the history of any political entity will become a nightmare to read about on Wikipedia - you'll have to piece together a chain of differently named articles to get an overall picture.

Think of Egypt's history. From the top of my head I can estimate that you'll need over 30 different wikipedia pages to cover its history only up until the Roman period! Then you'll need to create another batch of separate pages for "Omayyad Egypt", "Abbasid Egypt".. etc etc.. up until the Ottoman province and colonial regimes etc. This is not unusual for a country with a long history. That's why I think continuity of a political "unit" (even if formal on-paper sovereignty changes) should be a factor in deciding whether or not to split or lump.

Regarding the term "British Cape Colony", I've only heard it when it's specifically necessary to distinguish it from the Dutch colony. Regarding common usage, I'll be convinced if the search for "Cape Colony" does not return significantly more than the sum of the two searches for both the two terms you advocate using.

I'm sorry that nobody responded to your note on the talk-page several years ago. I wasn't aware of there being a problem, so I didn't check the talk page - it's possible that nobody else did either. I don't think you were being out-of-line or unreasonable in then going ahead and splitting the article, but I do still disagree with the choice. Abu Shawka (talk) 12:23, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Proposal: turn in into a disambiguation page

The current version is just a skeleton-article linking to the Dutch and British periods of the Cape Colony, and for now it has no content. It is also unlikely to be expanded in the short term, as anything that could be added to this page would be better placed in either Dutch Cape Colony or British Cape Colony.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 12:44, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Cape Colony which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 21:02, 29 December 2020 (UTC)