From Colonial Encounters to Repertoires of Difference: Khoikhoi Images and Imperial Governance in Early Modern Europe

European representations of the Khoikhoi—designated in early modern sources by the derogatory ethnonym “Hottentots”—offer a revealing case through which to examine how knowledge produced in colonial settings was selected, reformulated and circulated within early modern European cultures. Focusing on the Dutch Cape of Good Hope between the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this article brings into dialogue two markedly different visual corpora: the drawings conventionally known as the Cape Album, which record Khoikhoi bodies, material culture and social practices within socially and materially contextualised scenes, and four drawings now preserved among the Carte di Castello in Florence, in which dancing, motherhood, hunting and warfare are organised into more self-contained visual configurations. Rather than treating these corpora as successive stages in a linear development from observation to stereotype, the article reconstructs the overlapping visual genealogies, colonial practices and circuits of transmission through which representations of the Khoikhoi were produced and made intelligible. Read alongside travel accounts, VOC records, printed images and collecting practices, the drawings reveal the coexistence of empirical observation, inherited pictorial conventions and reproducible visual types. The wider circulation and reuse of Khoikhoi representations also placed them within European arguments about religion, sociability, commerce, political authority and civilisation. The article argues that the cultural governance of difference depended not upon a single or coherent image of non-European peoples, but upon the production of competing yet portable repertoires through which human diversity could be described, compared and hierarchically organised.