BACKGROUND

The Cape of Good Hope Panel is a series of annual tax censuses (or opgaafrolle) collected by the colonial authorities in the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Cape Colony. The censuses contain information not only about the complete settler population – by the end of the period, a total of more than 50 000 individuals – but also the enslaved and indigenous Khoesan population that lived and worked within the colonial economy.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (The establishment, growth and legacy of a settler colony: Quantitative panel studies of the political economy of Cape Colony – Dnr: M20-0041), the purpose of this project is to transcribe the full series of tax censuses, match households across censuses, match census households to other sources (like probate inventories and auction rolls) and match census households across generations (using genealogical records). 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.

We aim to, ultimately, combine the wealth of data with innovative techniques to analyse and understand the economic development of this pre-industrial, colonial society.

NEWS

New paper on pioneer advantage published in The Economic History Review

Did the first settlers become wealthier than later arrivals? This is the question Jeanne Cilliers, Erik Green and Robert Ross ask in a new paper, now available online. They find that those who arrived early […]

Cape farmers were more affluent than their American counterparts, new paper shows

A new paper by Johan Fourie and Frank Garmon Jr published in The Economic History Review uses newly transcribed household-level tax censuses from the Dutch and British Cape Colony and the United States shortly after […]

Cape Panel team meets in person for first time

After lockdowns and Covid-related travel restrictions, the Cape of Good Hope Panel project team could finally meet for the first time in person. A workshop was held on 30 July in Paris, a day after […]

PhD student presents at EBHS

Lund PhD student Benjamin Chatterton presented his paper (co-authored with Erik Green and Calumet Links) at the Economic and Business History Society Conference in Salt Lake City in May. The paper is titled: Khoesan Resilience: […]

Kate Ekama presents at Cambridge and Nijmegen

In late April, postdoctoral fellow Kate Ekama presented her work on slum landlords in Cape Town at Cambridge University’s History department. It was an in-person event. Ekama next travelled to the Netherlands where she presented […]

Fourie presents Cape Panel paper at Peking and Michigan

On 17 March and 5 April respectively, Johan Fourie presented the paper ‘The income mobility of settlers: Evidence from annual Cape Colony tax censuses’ (with Erik Green, Auke Rijpma and Dieter von Fintel as co-authors) […]

THE TEAM

Erik Green

Department of Economic History, Lund University

Johan Fourie

Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University

Ann Carlos

Department of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder

Benjamin Chatterton

Department of Economic History, Lund University

Jeanne Cilliers

Department of Economic History, Lund University

Kate Ekama

Department of History, Stellenbosch University

Calumet Links

Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University

Igor Martin

Department of Economic History, Lund University

Anne McCants

Department of History, Massachusetts Institutes of Technology

Auke Rijpma

Department of History, Utrecht University

Robert Ross

Department of History, Leiden University

Jonathan Schoots

Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University

Dieter von Fintel

Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University

Leoné Walters

Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University

ADVISORY BOARD

Emmanuel
Akyeampong

Harvard University

Wayne
Dooling

SOAS University of London

Joseph
Ferrie

Northwestern University

Laura
Mitchell

UC Irvine

Sheilagh
Ogilvie

Oxford University

Jan Luiten
van Zanden

Utrecht University

DATASET

The transcribed annual tax censuses (opgaafrolle) will be made available during the course of the project.

RESEARCH

Fourie, J. and Garmon Jr, F. 2022. The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American Republic. Economic History Review, forthcoming.
Replication package

Cilliers, J., Green., E. and Ross, R., 2022. Did it pay to be a pioneer? Wealth accumulation in a newly settled frontier society. Economic History Review, forthcoming.
Replication package

Cillliers, J and E. Green (2018) ‘The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier’, International Review of Social History, 63(2): 239-271

Rijpma, A., Cilliers, J. and Fourie, J., 2020. Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 53(2), pp.112-129.

Links, C., Fourie, J. and Green, E., 2020. The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. Economic History of Developing Regions, 35(2), pp.98-122.

Cilliers, J., Fourie, J. and Swanepoel, C., 2019. ‘Unobtrusively into the ranks of colonial society’: Intergenerational wealth mobility in the Cape Colony over the eighteenth century. Economic History of Developing Regions, 34(1), pp.48-71.

Cilliers, J. and Mariotti, M., 2019. The shaping of a settler fertility transition: eighteenth-and nineteenth-century South African demographic history reconsidered. European Review of Economic History, 23(4), pp.421-445.

Fourie, J. and Green, E., 2018. Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel. The History of the Family, 23(3), pp.493-502.

Fourie, J. and Green, E., 2015. The missing people: accounting for the productivity of indigenous populations in Cape Colonial History. Journal of African History, 56(2), p.195.