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Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

How did Einstein help create Eskom? Why can an Indonesian volcano explain the Great Trek? What do King Zwelithini and Charlemagne have in common?

These are some of the questions Johan Fourie explores in this entertaining, accessible economic history spanning everything from the human migration out of Africa 100 000 years ago to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom is an engaging guide to complex debates about the roots and reasons for prosperity, the march of opportunity versus the crushing boot of exploitation, and why the builders of societies – rather than the burglars ­– ultimately win out.

Join the author on this enriching journey through an African-centred history and the story of our long walk towards a brighter future.

Johan Fourie
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00November 19th, 2021|Africa, Education, History, South Africa|Comments Off on Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom
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De jure property rights and state capacity: evidence from land specification in the Boer Republics

De jure property rights and state capacity: evidence from land specification in the Boer Republics

We examine the development of de jure property rights to land by assessing how accurately governments recorded borders of property. We use surveys of farm parcels from two historical states, the Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS) and the South African Republic (ZAR), which are in modern-day South Africa, and employ a descriptive analysis to infer how accurately maps represent parcels of property. We argue that differences in state administrative capacity explains differences in map accuracy and therefore the provision of de jure property rights to land. We find that maps of farms in the ZAR, which had lower administrative capacity, tend to be less accurate than maps of farms in the OFS. Comparisons with military maps compiled under a different administration provide evidence that the costs incurred from previous administrations can limit future attempts to accurately record property. The analysis shows how state administrative capacity can facilitate (or hinder) the provision of property rights to land.

Kara Dimitruk, Sophia du Plessis, Stan du Plessis
Journal of Institutional Economics
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00November 19th, 2021|Papers|Comments Off on De jure property rights and state capacity: evidence from land specification in the Boer Republics
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Correlates and Consequences of the 1918 Influenza in South Africa

Correlates and Consequences of the 1918 Influenza in South Africa

We study the demographic and economic correlates of the 1918 influenza or “Spanish flu” that killed an estimated 6% of South Africa’s population. While the pandemic has received some attention in South African historiography and from social scientists in other contexts, little is known about its long-term impact on the country. Bringing together data from a range of new sources, including population and agricultural censuses, household surveys, and the voters’ rolls, we provide analyses that show, first, the factors that (do and do not) predict flu mortality across South Africa’s magisterial districts, and, second, suggest some important consequences of the flu. Our results reveal a large but short-lived demographic shock, and detectable, if small scale, long-term economic consequences.

Daniel de Kadt, Johan Fourie, Jan Greyling, Elie Murard, Johannes Norling

South African Journal of Economics

By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00November 19th, 2021|Papers|Comments Off on Correlates and Consequences of the 1918 Influenza in South Africa
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Health inequality and the 1918 Spanish flu

The 1918 influenza – the Spanish flu – killed an estimated 6% of South Africans. Not all were equally affected.

Mortality rates were particularly high in districts with a large share of black and coloured residents. To investigate why this happened, we transcribed 39,482 death certificates from the Cape Province. Using a novel indicator – whether a doctor’s name appears on the death certificate – we argue that the unequal health outcomes were a consequence of unequal access to healthcare. Our results show that the racial inequalities in health outcomes that existed before October 1918 were exacerbated during the pandemic. Access to healthcare, as we expected, worsened for black and coloured residents of the Cape Province. Unexpectedly, however, we found that other inequalities were unchanged, or even reversed, notably age, occupation and location. Living in the city, for instance, became a health hazard rather than a benefit during the pandemic. These surprising results contradict the general assumption that all forms of inequality are exacerbated during a crisis. Our analyses suggest explanations for the widening racial gap in healthcare access during the 1918 pandemic, from both the demand and the supply side. We could find, however, no evidence of racial prejudice. Our findings confirm the importance of taking race into account in studying the effects of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic or other world crises.
Johan Fourie and Jonathan Jayes.
World Development
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00March 15th, 2021|Consequences, History, South Africa|Comments Off on Health inequality and the 1918 Spanish flu
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When Cape slavery ended: Introducing a new slave emancipation dataset

When the enslaved were emancipated across the British Empire in 1834, slave-owners received cash compensation, and four years of unpaid labour as the former slaves became apprentices.

In the Cape Colony, appraisers assigned a value to the former slaves. To investigate this, we transcribed 37,411 valuation records to compile a novel emancipation dataset. This gives us a new picture of the enslaved population in the Cape at the time of the emancipation. Some of our findings, for example that slaves from south-east Asia were assigned lower valuations than Cape-born slaves, are in contrast to those of an earlier literature. To distinguish between what the former slave-owners should have received and what they actually received, we matched the valuation records to the compensation claims. We argue that the uneven allocation of compensation had important implications for the distribution of capital after emancipation.
Kate Ekama, Johan Fourie, Hans Heese and Lisa-Cheree Martin
Explorations in Economic History
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00March 15th, 2021|Cape Colony, Cape slavery|Comments Off on When Cape slavery ended: Introducing a new slave emancipation dataset
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Public Sector Growth in the British Cape Colony: Evidence From New Data on Expenditure and Foreign Debt, 1830‐1910

The public expenditure shifts that took place following the discovery of diamonds and gold during the second half of the nineteenth century had far‐reaching consequences for southern Africa’s development.

Using new data for public expenditure and foreign debt in the Cape Colony and evidence from Cape parliamentary budget debates, we trace and explain the growth of the public sector. We find that the coincidence of mineral discovery in 1867 and the granting of responsible government status rapidly accelerated the growth of the public sector. Owing to strong mining interests, railways accounted for more than 70% of the public works expenditure from the 1880s onwards. Spending on human capital and welfare enhancement remained limited. Both the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the mining elites managed to build coalitions that swayed public expenditure decisions towards self‐serving ends.
Using new data for public expenditure and foreign debt in the Cape Colony and evidence from Cape parliamentary budget debates, we trace and explain the growth of the public sector. We find that the coincidence of mineral discovery in 1867 and the granting of responsible government status rapidly accelerated the growth of the public sector. Owing to strong mining interests, railways accounted for more than 70% of the public works expenditure from the 1880s onwards. Spending on human capital and welfare enhancement remained limited. Both the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the mining elites managed to build coalitions that swayed public expenditure decisions towards self‐serving ends.
Abel Gwaindepi and Johan Fourie
South African Journal of Economics
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00March 15th, 2021|Cape Colony, History|Comments Off on Public Sector Growth in the British Cape Colony: Evidence From New Data on Expenditure and Foreign Debt, 1830‐1910
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Black Disenfranchisement in the Cape Colony, c.1887–1909: Challenging the Numbers

It is generally agreed that the Cape Colony’s disenfranchisement legislation did what it set out to do: it drastically reduced the number of blacks who were eligible to vote.

However, we find that empirical support for this view is weak. We argue that disenfranchisement was not as effective as is claimed. We question the literature on black disenfranchisement in the late 19th-century Cape Colony. Using a surname-matching formula in combination with manual methods, we counted voters in the Cape Colony voters’ rolls between 1887 and 1909 and found that the number of blacks who lost the right to vote in 1887 is much smaller than the 30,000 that has been claimed. Our empirical evidence shows it to be around a tenth of that number. Conversely, the number of disenfranchised white and coloured voters is larger than expected. Ours is an important contribution, as no researcher to date has systematically gone through these voters’ rolls to provide empirical evidence to support or refute the claims about disenfranchisement. The lower than expected number of disenfranchised black voters may be due to their resistance to being stripped of the franchise. The larger than expected number of disenfranchised white and coloured voters may have been due to recession and white poverty.
Farai Nyika and Johan Fourie
Journal of Southern African Studies
By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00March 15th, 2021|Cape Colony, Cape slavery|Comments Off on Black Disenfranchisement in the Cape Colony, c.1887–1909: Challenging the Numbers
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The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony

The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour.

This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax datasets (1805–1828) to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. We find that slave labour, indigenous labour and settler family labour were not substitutable over the period of the study. This lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. Indigenous khoe labour and slave labour remain complements throughout the period of the study even when khoe labour becomes scarce after the frontier conflicts. We argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was due to the settlers’ need to acquire labourers with location-specific skills such as the indigenous khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than as a source of unskilled labour, such as for artisan skills or for collateral.

Calumet Links, Johan Fourie and Erik Green

Economic History of Developing Regions

By |2024-10-25T11:03:07+00:00March 15th, 2021|Cape Colony, Cape slavery, Causes|Comments Off on The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony
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The great divergence in South Africa

The great divergence in South Africa: Population and wealth dynamics over two centuries.

Dieter von Fintel, Johan Fourie

Journal of Comparative Economics, Volume 47, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 759-773

By |2024-10-25T11:03:21+00:00December 12th, 2019|Africa, Historical demography|Comments Off on The great divergence in South Africa
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The Frontiers of Finance

The financial and business history of the British Cape Colony

The Frontiers of Finance is a research project that studies the financial and business history of the British Cape Colony. Funded partially through the South African National Research Foundation, the project examines the emergence of joint stock companies in the Cape Colony and Southern Africa from 1862 onwards.

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By |2024-10-25T11:03:21+00:00March 28th, 2019|Current projects|Comments Off on The Frontiers of Finance
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Copyright © LEAP, Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University, All rights Reserved.

ABOUT LEAP

Stellenbosch University has a proud record of Economic History teaching and research. Prof. Sampie Terreblanche, appointed Professor of Economic History in 1968, will be remembered for his fearlessness in speaking truth to power, a public intellectual who constantly reminded apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa of the injustice inherent in economic inequality. The Department of Economics now honours Sampie, as he was widely known, with a dedicated website and repository of his written work.

The global renaissance of African economic history since the early 2000s has spurred a new generation of Stellenbosch economists to carry on the work of Prof. Terreblanche. Instrumental in this was the hosting of the 2012 World Economic History Congress. The Congress, held during a cold July, attracted more than 800 international scholars and positioned Stellenbosch as one of the leading centres of economic history on the African continent. Following the Congress, plans were made to formalise the Economic History group at Stellenbosch University, with the aim of expanding and improving quantitative African economic history research. LEAP became a formal Type 1-centre within the Department of Economics in 2023.

Success depended on recruiting high-potential students and exposing them to the leading thinkers in African economic history and economic and social history more generally.

The Department of Economics now teach an undergraduate and graduate Economic History course annually. To build the essential collaborative networks across Europe, North America and Africa, the department has appointed five Research Associates and one Extraordinary Professor in Economic History, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Professor of Economic History at Utrecht University. The economic history cluster, consisting of staff and students interested in African economic history, has met weekly since 2014 for a brown-bag seminar. The cluster was formalised at the beginning of 2015 when LEAP was launched.

In the last five years, LEAP has grown from a handful of students to a group of more than 25 students, postdocs and faculty. 

Economic History is now taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The undergraduate course was turned into a commercially successful book, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom, published by Tafelberg in 2021 and Cambridge University Press in 2022, reaching markets far beyond the classroom. Graduate students have been successfully placed within PhD programmes in the UK (Warwick), Germany (Tubingen) and Sweden (Lund). Several have also completed their PhDs within LEAP.

International collaborative partnerships are key to leveraging world-class research.

To build networks across Europe, North America and Africa, the department has appointed several Research Associates and one Extraordinary Professor in Economic History, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Professor of Economic History at Utrecht University. Between 2018 and 2022, the Biography of an Uncharted People project, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has facilitated greater interaction with the History department at Stellenbosch University. The scope of work has expanded beyond economic history, to also include social, demographic, financial and family history.

Since 2021, LEAP researchers have been involved in the Cape of Good Hope Panel project, one of the largest social science projects in Sweden. Thanks to a generous grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the purpose of this project is to transcribe the full series of tax censuses and match households across censuses. This would allow us to investigate questions about the evolution of living standards and economic development, inequality and social mobility, networks and elite formation and slavery and labour coercion.

LEAP has identified five traits that characterise our work:

Creativity
Courage
Credibility
Collaboration
Compassion

With these exciting developments going on, the future of quantitative African economic and social history research looks promising.

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