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.
The Cape of Good Hope Panel
The Cape of Good Hope Panel
Lead researchers: Johan Fourie, Erik Green and Dieter von Fintel.
We construct an annual panel dataset of a complete settler population over more than 150 years in the global south, specifically the Cape Colony. This will be the longest such dataset in existence for any society in the world, tracking multiple generations across a period that stretches beyond any one lifetime.
Funding: National Research Foundation Human and Social Dynamics in Development, Swedish Handelsbanken, Wallenberg Foundation
Biography of an Uncharted People
Digital Humanities and the Data Revolution in South African History
“Digital Humanities” operates at the intersection of the humanities and computing. Scholars using the methods of the Digital Humanities can make use of a variety of tools, from algorithms that help with textual analysis, to image recognition, or Big Data techniques. They can digitize and transcribe large databases and analyze individuals’ characteristics and behavior. In the absence of other information of South Africans, particularly black citizens, who were often excluded from censuses and reports and underrepresented in other types of archival records such as personal collections of letters, individual-level records are a treasure trove of information about the economic, social, demographic, health, labor, genealogical and migration histories of the Cape Colony and South Africa.