THEWHITEINVADERS
valley to white settlement. Whites began to pour into the area. With official
support and relatively easy access to capital, they gradually edged the
Khoikhoi people out of their landholdings.s?
As the collapse of the Kat River settlement shows, the land issue was
intimately bound up with the question of political power. By the mid-
nineteenth century, Great Britain was making its final breaks with its
mercantilist heritage. The protective tariff on grain went in 1846, and with
it the very idea of running a formal empire as a closed economy. In that
heyday of British industrial power, British businessmen, confident in their
capacity to outproduce, out-trade, and out-finance foreigners, were ques-
tioning the rationale for colonial dependency. Why should their tax money
go to administering and policing overseas territories, when their inhabi-
tants would choose to import British manufactures for their needs and to
seek British markets for their produce, even if formal political ties were
lacking? Businessmen did not govern England; but the Whig faction of the
landed aristocracy and gentry who still controlled the British political
system met them halfway. Their approach to the colonial question "was