This thesis presents migrants from the German lands as integral to Dutch imperial ventures of the early modern era, and questions to what extent the European dimension of Dutch colonialism was Dutch in composition and character. German labour underpinned the operation, governance and expansion of the Dutch empire. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, around 250,000 Germans served in the Dutch East India Company in its territories in southern Africa and southeast Asia, totalling over a quarter of the Company’s workforce. Germans enlisted primarily as sailors and soldiers, and to a lesser extent as artisans, surgeons and clergymen. Two-thirds of these employees stayed in the Dutch overseas territories for good, in particular in the Cape Colony. This thesis argues that Germans were effective agents of Dutch colonialism as they adapted to Cape colonial society within a generation. Assimilation arose from the actions of the Germans themselves who aimed at greater social and economic access, as well as the restrictive measures of the Dutch colonial administration. This study assesses the migrants’ degree of assimilation into the Cape colonial environment. The central parameters to analyse this assimilation process are the diverse backgrounds of the migrants, their social networks, language learning efforts, religious adaptation, contact with the German lands and their status in Cape society. Research in archives in Europe and South Africa forms the basis for the analysis. “Germans in the Dutch Cape Colony” argues for the incorporation of the Dutch empire as a destination for German long-distance mobility in the early modern era alongside the well-known migrations to North America, eastern Europe and Russia. The study also expands scholarship on religious tolerance to the Dutch overseas territories by examining the interaction between branches of Christianity in a colonial setting. The thesis stresses the multiplicity of backgrounds within the European population of the Dutch overseas territories and questions the ‘Dutch’ character of an empire that was run by a mainly German-speaking populace by the second half of the eighteenth century.