Africa

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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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 data revolution in African economic history

The data revolution in African economic history

Big Data can be consequential for the field of history. The surge in computing power and access to data processing software and online resources have enabled historians over the past two decades to capture historical statistics on a much larger scale than before. In this paper I argue that the data revolution is especially valuable for studying the history of regions where written records are fairly scarce, such as sub-Saharan Africa. With the tools of data transcription, augmentation, and collaboration we are discovering much we did not know about the African past and its echoes in the present. The continuing projects to transcribe and digitize large numbers of colonial and post-colonial records are likely to teach us still more about Africa’s economic past over the coming decade.

By |2024-10-25T11:03:21+00:00June 14th, 2018|Africa, History|Comments Off on The data revolution in African economic history
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Settler skills and colonial development

Settler skills and colonial development: the Huguenot wine-makers in eighteenth-century Dutch South Africa

Johan Fourie & Dieter Fintel, 2014.

Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(4), pages 932-963.

By |2024-10-25T11:03:22+00:00June 14th, 2018|Africa, Past research projects, South Africa|Comments Off on Settler skills and colonial development
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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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