Johan Fourie

Stellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Economics

Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa....

This paper examines wine output and slave labor productivity in the Dutch and British Cape Colony, leveraging annual tax censuses. We document a substantial increase in wine production, but, despite substantial institutional changes over more than a century, we find surprisingly stable median wine yields. Exploiting the farm-level nature of our dat...

A large literature on favouritism argues that leaders favour their own ethnicity or administrative birthplace. We question the assumption that these leaders are exogenously selected for office. Using historical censuses from 11 African countries, we show that leaders are selected from more advanced regions. In other words, our sample shows that Afr...

We calculate, for the first time, farm-level wheat productivity for Cape Colony settler farmers in 1825. We can do so because we now have access to a fully transcribed tax census for that year. Although there is some variation in wheat productivity across the Colony, probably a result of the varying environmental factors, we find much larger variat...

One of the biggest challenges in the study of history is the unreliable nature of traditional archival sources which omit histories of marginalised groups. This book makes the case that quantitative history offers a way to fill these gaps in the archive. Showcasing 13 case studies from the South African past, it applies quantitative sources, tools...

One of the biggest challenges in the study of history is the unreliable nature of traditional archival sources which omit histories of marginalised groups. This book makes the case that quantitative history offers a way to fill these gaps in the archive. Showcasing 13 case studies from the South African past, it applies quantitative sources, tools...

One of the biggest challenges in the study of history is the unreliable nature of traditional archival sources which omit histories of marginalised groups. This book makes the case that quantitative history offers a way to fill these gaps in the archive. Showcasing 13 case studies from the South African past, it applies quantitative sources, tools...

One of the biggest challenges in the study of history is the unreliable nature of traditional archival sources which omit histories of marginalised groups. This book makes the case that quantitative history offers a way to fill these gaps in the archive. Showcasing 13 case studies from the South African past, it applies quantitative sources, tools...

One of the biggest challenges in the study of history is the unreliable nature of traditional archival sources which omit histories of marginalised groups. This book makes the case that quantitative history offers a way to fill these gaps in the archive. Showcasing 13 case studies from the South African past, it applies quantitative sources, tools...

Can wealth shocks have intergenerational health consequences? We use the partial compensation slaveholders received after the 1834 slave emancipation in the British Cape Colony to measure the intergenerational effects of a wealth loss on longevity. We find that a greater loss of slave wealth shortened the lifespans of the generation of slaveholders...

Ekonomiese geskiedkundiges het deesdae die kwantitatiewe middele om “geskiedenisse van onder af” te ontsluit. Ons wil die vraag beantwoord: Wat gee gewone mense die vermoë om beter lewens te bou, en wat weerhou die vryheid om dit te doen van hulle? In hierdie skrywe gebruik ek my familiegeskiedenis om hierdie vraag te beantwoord. Terwyl ek my famil...

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom is an entertaining and engaging guide to global economic history told for the first time from an African perspective. In thirty-five short chapters Johan Fourie tells the story of 100,000 years of human history spanning humankind's migration out of Africa to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unique account reveals just ho...

Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settl...

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Upr...

There was nothing special about James Hargreaves. Born in 1721 near Blackburn in Lancashire, he never learned to read. As he grew to adulthood his only job prospect was that open to other Blackburn men of his standing: he became a hand-loom weaver who turned yarn into fabric to make a living. From his meagre salary he supported his wife and thirtee...

In May 2000 the world’s leading financial weekly announced that there was little hope for the future of Africa. Under the headline ‘The hopeless continent’, The Economist’s cover showed a young man, presumably a rebel, carrying an anti-tank rocket launcher, over a cut-out of the region. The dark background spelled doom. The Economist was not alone...

Throughout human history, societies have had to solve three economic problems. The first is to ensure that enough goods are produced. The second is that enough of the right goods are produced. The third is that these things are distributed fairly to everyone. The first two are problems of production and the third is a problem of distribution. How d...

On the east coast of Tanzania, south of Dar es Salaam, lies the tiny island of Kilwa Kisiwani. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the port city of Kilwa was the centre of trade for the entire Swahili coast, integrated in a trading network that stretched as far as Arabia, India and even China. The inhabitants of this beautiful city were...

Long-haul tourists visiting South Africa are always fascinated by the clicks of isiXhosa. Foreign to their ears, the eighteen click consonants can be grouped into three types: the ‘c’ is a dental click made by the tongue at the back of the mouth, the lateral ‘x’ is made by the tongue at the sides of the mouth, and the alveolar ‘q’ is made by the ti...

Africa is a massive continent. One could fit all of Western and Eastern Europe (including the UK), India, Japan and China, and the United States into the continent, and still have space left. Africa, of course, has far fewer people. In 2021 an estimated 1.4 billion people lived on the African continent. The combined number for those other countries...

On 9 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a port city of Japan. Sumiteru Taniguchi was sixteen at the time, delivering post about a mile from ground zero. The force of the explosion threw him from his bicycle, melting his cotton shirt and searing the skin off his back and one arm. But Taniguchi survived, one of the fort...

Predicting the future is a perilous exercise. But that has not stopped us trying. Hunter-gatherers carefully studied their natural environment to predict food availability. The earliest farmers developed sophisticated ways to predict rain. In the eighth century BCE the oracle of Delphi attracted to her temple those who wanted to know the future. Ot...

Walk into the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Poland’s capital, and it won’t be long before you’ll begin to feel the eeriness that comes with being surrounded by death.1 One exhibit allows visitors to cower inside a replica of the sewers where members of the Polish underground resistance used to hide while fighting the Nazis. Another exhibit shows origin...

In March 1887 Robert Germond, a missionary in charge of a small mission station at Thabana Morena on the western border of present-day Lesotho, reported sad news. Basutoland, he wrote, ‘produces less and finds no outlet for its products. Its normal markets, Kimberley and the Free State, purchase Australian and colonial wheat … Basutoland, we must a...

Iceland is a country of rugged beauty, volcanic mountains, countless waterfalls and, well, ice. Its inhabitants are even more exotic; 54 per cent of Icelanders, for example, believe in elves – or say it’s possible that they exist. Travelling through the desolate landscape, one can easily imagine how such beliefs emerge: Iceland is a country with fe...

On 27 April 1994 Nelson Mandela’s long walk to political freedom came to an end. On that fresh autumn morning 22 million South Africans headed to their nearest voting booths to cast their votes, many for the first time, in the country’s first democratic elections. The mood was festive. After almost a century of political exclusion, black South Afri...

‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’1 So begins Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, a book in which he appeals against one of the most consequential pieces of legislation passed by the new Union of South Africa after its establishment...

Around 1300 CE, so the legend goes, the king of the Malian empire in West Africa hatched a plan. He believed that the earth was round and wanted to prove it, so he equipped 200 boats full of men and another 200 full of gold, water and victuals, and sent them west. After a long time only one boat returned, reporting that ‘we have navigated for a lon...

When Milton Obote was inaugurated as Uganda’s first prime minister in 1962, the future of the country that Winston Churchill had called ‘the Pearl of Africa’ looked brighter than ever. Independence from Britain had come with a carefully constructed federal constitution that gave some internal autonomy to the ancient kingdom of Buganda and its king,...

By November 1932 the United States economy was in a deep depression. The unemployment rate was above 20 per cent, the highest it had ever been, and the production of goods and services had fallen by 28 per cent since its peak in 1929. America needed fresh ideas. It found them in a new president. During the first hundred days of his presidency Frank...

In December 1932, in the throes of a deep recession, South Africa left the gold standard. Britain had abandoned it the previous year – and a political battle within South Africa’s government had ensured a delay that severely hurt the economy. The decision to leave had an immediate effect; instead of having the currency backed by gold, the South Afr...

In 1532 a motley band of 168 Spanish soldiers arrived on the outskirts of Cajamarca, the capital of the mighty Incan empire in present-day Peru. Already on his third expedition to the New World, Francisco Pizarro had one aim: to find gold and claim it for the Spanish king. He first sent his trusted captain, Hernando de Soto, to meet with the In can...

You wouldn’t call it a classic joke. It’s more of a quip, to be honest; something you might hear at a computer-science convention. It is said that the number of people predicting the end of Moore’s law doubles every two years. Lol. For the uninitiated, Moore’s law refers to Gordon Moore’s prediction, in 1965, that the number of transistors on a com...

October 1887 a veterinarian in Belfast was tinkering with his son’s bicycle. Its metal wheels made the cycle slow, so to fix this, John Dunlop took some rubber that he used in his veterinary practice; he added the inflated tube of sheet rubber to a wooden wheel and rolled both the wooden and metal wheels across his yard in a game to see which could...

Just before the start of the First World War, Robert Millikan, professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a specialist in electron theory, travelled to Germany to present an academic paper. A few years earlier, in 1905, the scientist Albert Einstein had proposed a linear relationship between the wavelength of light and the maximum veloci...

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel. Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, a...

It rained on the first day of December in 1838. This was a day to remember. Across the Cape Colony the yoke of forced labour had been lifted from the almost 40,000 inhabitants who had formerly been classified as slaves. They were now free. It had been a long road to freedom. When the Dutch first settled the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century the A...

Gorée is a small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. Enjoying an exquisitely grilled filet de saint pierre in one of the harbour restaurants as the sun sets, it is easy to imagine the place as a summer resort for the West African rich and famous. But below its serene exterior lies a dark history. On 27 June 2013 one of the descendants of the pe...

Since the board game Settlers of Catan was first released in 1995 it has sold more than 25 million copies. It works like this. Play starts after tiles of different land types – mountains producing iron ore, pastures sustaining sheep, and so on – are laid out – and numbers between 2 and 12 are randomly assigned to each tile. Every player picks a spo...

The main reason for the long-lasting popularity of Lego bricks is their versatility. A back-of-the-envelope calculation will reveal that six bricks of 2 x 4 studs can be combined in almost 1 billion ways. And because Lego bricks made today still interlock with those first made in 1958, the year the toy was first patented, the possibilities for crea...

At least two decades before the arrival of the first European colonists at the southern tip of Africa, Autshumao, the chief of the Gorinhaikonas, settled in Table Bay. Although Europeans had sailed past the Cape in 1488, the volume of ships only increased after the establishment of the VOC in 1602 and the expansion of the spice trade between Europe...

In his bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes: ‘We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.’1 This statement captures a fundamental truth about the Neolithic Revolution, sometimes also called the Agricultural Revolution, which began about 10,000 BCE. This was a period in history when humans transitioned from a lifestyle of hunting...

On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and the Lombards, and father of at least eighteen children, was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III at Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne thereby united most of Western Europe under his rule, a vast area home to between 10 and 20 million people.1 Almost a...

We construct an anthropometric measure of living standards for White South Africans covering 55 years using five different military sources. Accounting for different selection across the forces, we find that prior to industrialisation, White South African males were amongst the tallest in the world. Rural living standards declined in response to na...

Mega-sport events continue to attract interest from potential hosts around the world. The belief is that these events bring the host city and country not only prestige but also economic benefits, notably tourism. A decade ago, Fourie and Santana-Gallego (2011) published a seminal paper that defined a gravity model for tourism demand to estimate the...

As a social institution that permeates almost all societies, marriage trends and practices are studied across the social sciences. Yet South African marriages, past and present, remain understudied, notably because of a lack of adequate source material. This paper contributes to a better understanding of marriage trends in the South African past by...

At the beginning of the twentieth century in South Africa, the sex ratio for black children under five years was one of the lowest ever recorded. Sex ratios also differed markedly by racial group. Those for white children remained almost invariable, with more boys than girls, while black children had a clear majority of girls, a situation that the...

The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act N...

This paper uses the South African objects in the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian to tell a new material history of money in South Africa. In other parts of the continent, research about the currencies in use and how these changed over time have offered a new perspective on the impact of colonialism, commercialization, and the rise...

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...

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 da...

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 dat...

Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and corruption, not all the empirical evidence supports this view. This article investigates the extent to which insecurity hurts tourism in Africa. We use a new data set consisting of 187 countries, 38 of which are in Africa, for the period 1995–2017. It c...

International trade in higher education services is one of the fastest growing tradable service sectors globally. Apart from the positive externalities international students create through knowledge mobility and spill-over, campus diversity, and local community development participation, spending by international students in the host city and imme...

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 expla...

Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twentieth-century evolution of military technology that shifted the demand for workers of different stature illustrates the importance of labor demand beyond the commonly discussed influences originating with labor supply. English-born soldiers in the Angl...

The South African economy transformed substantially since 1910. While primary sectors like agriculture and mining had formed the backbone of the economy during the early decades, financial services and other tertiary sector industries were the biggest contributors to production by the end of the period. These processes of industrialisation and mode...

At the Cape of Good Hope between 1836 and 1841 there was a remarkable spike in imports and exports. Historians have assumed this was because the financial compensation slave-owners received when slavery was abolished in 1834 encouraged speculation. But our historical research on the imports and exports recorded in the Cape Colony’s blue books sugge...

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 disenfr...

WORKING PAPER 804. https://econrsa.org/system/files/publications/working_papers/working_paper_804.pdf At the beginning of the twentieth century the sex ratio for South Africans di⁄ered markedly according to racial group. Those for white South Africans remained almost invariable, with more boys than girls, while black South Africans had a clear maj...

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...

Does wealth persist over time, despite the disruptions of historical shocks like colonisation? This paper shows that South Africa experienced a reversal of fortunes after the arrival of European settlers in the eastern half of the country. Yet this was not because of an institutional reversal. We argue, instead, that black South Africans found them...

One of the most controversial laws promulgated by the National Party as part of South Africa’s mid-twentieth century apartheid policies was the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. This Act stipulated that ‘a marriage between a European and non-European may not be solemnized, and any such marriage solemnized in contravention of the provisions o...

Much has been said about the rise, or ‘renaissance’, of African economic history. What has received far less attention is who is producing this research. Using a complete dataset of articles in the top four economic history journals, I document the rise in African economic history in the last two decades. I show that although there has indeed been...

Much has been said about the rise, or 'renaissance', of African economic history. What has received far less attention is who is producing this research. Using a complete dataset of articles in the top four economic history journals, I document the rise in African economic history in the last two decades. I show that although there has indeed been...

Intergenerational mobility studies are now expanding in three directions – including different regions and time periods, using different outcomes to measure mobility, and investigating the mechanisms that affect mobility. We investigate, for the first time, wealth mobility in the Cape Colony. We compare a number of outcomes, and consider several me...

Can wealth shocks have intergenerational health consequences? We use the partial compensation slaveholders received after the 1834 slave emancipation in the British Cape Colony to measure the intergenerational effects of a wealth loss on longevity. Because the share of partial compensation received was uncorrelated to wealth, we can interpret the r...

In this article, we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787–1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time....

This article investigates the effects of security threats, namely terrorism, crime, and corruption, on international tourist flows. We estimate a gravity model to evaluate differences in the instability measures between country pairs quantifying not only how security threats in the host country have a negative effect on inbound tourism but also how...

To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data set – still under construction – of Ca...

For economic transactions, including debt transactions, to occur in a market system, property rights are essential. The literature has focussed on finding empirical proof of the effect of property right regimes, noting differences between de jure and de facto property rights. We use a novel combination of data on wealth and demographics to investig...

African economic history is experiencing a renaissance, and South African economic history likewise. Combining newly transcribed large historical datasets with econometric techniques now standard in the economics literature, economic historians have greatly improved our understanding of South Africa’s development over the centuries. Yet many questi...

In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related to similar cycles in real GDP per capita during the same period. In addition to removing noise in the historical data, smoothing out short-run fluctuations also eliminates the short-run impact on agricultural production due to idiosyncratic shocks such a...

In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787-1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By...

Cambridge Core - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics - Wine Globalization - edited by Kym Anderson

Built largely to support the early mining industry, the Cape Colony's railway substantially reduced the cost of transport to the interior and account for 22-25 percent of the increase in the Colony's labor productivity from 1873 to 1905. Little of the gains went to the state-owned company: the Cape government seems instead to have mainly considered...

Very little income or wage data were systematically recorded about the living standards of South Africa’s black majority during much of the 20th century. We used four data sets to provide an alternative measure of living standards – namely stature – to document, for the first time, living standards of black South Africans over the course of the 20t...

The central focus of this research project is the investigation of the role of education in promoting social mobility for the poor in the highly unequal South African economic landscape. The investigation is of particular relevance in a country where the rapid expansion of educational attainment since the 1970s has not produced the desired labour m...

Credit markets develop hand in hand with a market economy. Pre-industrial credit markets, like credit (and capital) markets today, developed in order to smooth consumption, ease trade, and enable long-term investment. Yet in the 18th-century Cape Colony, a Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Africa, commentators of the day were sceptical about...

In the absence of historical income or education data, the change in occupations over time can be used as a measure of mobility. This paper investigates intergenerational occupational mobility using a novel genealogical dataset for settler South Africa, spanning its transition from an agricultural to an early industrialised society (1800-1909). We...

Very little income or wage data was systematically recorded on the living standards of South Africa's black majority during much of the twentieth century. This paper uses four data sets to document, for the first time, an alternative measure of living standards: the stature of black South Africans over the course of the twentieth century. We find e...

Using newly digitised and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of the composition of the South African Constabulary, a volunteer force of mostly English recruits during and after the Second South African War. These records contain personal particulars such as age, country of origin, occupation and religion for 10,399 s...

This research note identifies the period when South African prices began to move in unison with those of the country’s lead trading partner. We find that South African wheat prices started reflecting UK trends soon after the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior of the country. The mineral revolution, it seems, was responsible for integrat...

The physique of rugby players has evolved over the course of the Twentieth Century. A novel morphological dataset was constructed of all Springbok rugby players until 2014. Although most of the change in body structure, particularly body weight, occurs during the era of professionalism, white Springbok rugby players always were found to have been t...

Die konsentrasiekampe van die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) wek steeds intense emosies op. Om dié rede is dit ook verstaanbaar dat 'n breë literatuur verskeie aspekte van die konsentrasiekampe en die lewe van die bewoners ondersoek. Vreemd genoeg, is een aspek wat wel agterweë gelaat is 'n kwantitatiewe ondersoek na die lengte van verblyf vir die m...

The recent surge in computing power and access to data-processing software and online resources enables historians to capture historical statistics on a much larger scale than before. The data revolution—encompassing unprecedented advances in data transcription, augmentation, and collaboration—is especially valuable for studying the history of regi...