small towns-local
markets and merchant centers.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the legal practices of the
Dutch, notably the institution of slavery, had led to the development of a
racial order. Under the British, the racial order had adapted to the transi-
tion from formal slavery to formal freedom, In the coming century the
racial order would also survive and adapt to the advent of industrialization
and urbanization-a
striking example of the durability of deeprooted so-
cial structures.
Even so, many Afrikaners, especially those in the eastern districts, found
it difficult to accept these and other changes. In 1815, when a few im-
poverished trekboers had fomented a rebellion, the substantial farmers had
joined with the British forces "insuppressing them. 76 During the I830S,
however, anti-British feeling was widespread among all classes of eastern
Afrikaners, and by 1840 some six thousand men, women, and children-
about 9 percent of the total white population of the Colony-had
left their
homes with their wagons, cattle, sheep, and all movable property. They
took with them perhaps five thousand Coloured "servants, most of whom
were of Khoikhoi descent, though some were former slaves who had be-
come apprentices
in 1'834. The Afrikaner
migrants-later
known
as