British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820-1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories
In 1820, Cape of Good Hope, British colony since 1795, became new home to c. 4,500 English-speaking settlers. Correspondence surviving from this period in reference to this settlement enables insights into early nineteenth century letters, still understudied area. Moreover, it provides good setting to disambiguate term from an internal, bottom-up perspective. Such perspective may offer a key for disclosing historical forms of communication (Hubler and Busse 2012: 1) as first-order phenomena. This is achieved in an analysis of categorial labels (keywords) and metacommunicative clues found in internal correspondence of Colonial Office, British government department, in years 1820-1821. The results of analysis provide partial answer to what label meant for this professional community. Adding researcher’s perspective to such description allows proposing twofold approach to the letter as an analytic category in study of historical correspondence