Abstract
The retail of alcohol was so central to the economy and society of the Cape of
Good Hope during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it earned the
nickname “tavern of two oceans”. This retail business was organised on the socalled
lease or monopoly (pacht) system whereby a person paid the authorities
for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area.
This paper traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the
Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or
monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by
investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased
off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the
first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which
alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape
developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century
Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local
circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an
illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business
practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.