Johan Fourie
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 974332 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Johan Fourie |
| PRENOMES | Johan |
| SOBRENOME | Fourie |
| ASSINATURA | FOURIE J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7341-017X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 183 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Prices and living standards
We construct an annual price index for the Cape Colony, 1718–1812, from more than 200,000 transactions recorded in estate-auction rolls. These records allow us to compute Laspeyres indices for a broad set of goods, including productive assets (livestock, equipment, and enslaved persons) and household durables (major, minor, and luxury items). By moving beyond subsistence baskets, we capture both the cost of acquiring inputs used to generate incom…
Colonial Elites in The Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony
We study eighteenth-century settler elites in the Stellenbosch–Drakenstein district. We examine income and wealth inequality from 1720 to 1810, which enabled the emergence of an economic elite. We then ask whether this group also held political office, and how that configuration evolved. Using annual tax censuses alongside lists of heemraden, local officials serving on district civil administrative and judicial boards, we recover the distribution…
Auction Records, Consumer Culture and Social Networks in the Cape Colony, 1701–1825
By the early nineteenth century, the Cape had evolved from a small VOC outpost into a sprawling colony of over 100, 000 square miles, integrated into global trade and migration networks. Its population included colonial officials, European settlers, enslaved people and indigenous groups, but everyday life in this society remains underexplored in the economic history literature. This article draws on a newly digitised source, the auction records (…
Marriage and immigrants in Cape Town
In colonial settler societies, a shortage of white marriageable women was often a concern, and until 1936, there were more white men that white women in Cape Town. The question of who marries who becomes particularly interesting in such contexts, especially in light of a constant stream of European immigrants to the city in the first half of the 20th-century. In our previous work, we discussed the merits of church marriage records as a source. He…
Income Mobility before Industrialization
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. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disenta…
Household Spending during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
The 1918 influenza outbreak was the deadliest pandemic of the twentieth century. Analysis of a 1918/9 cost-of-living survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals significant differences in household spending in ninety-nine cities at different stages of the pandemic. On average, households surveyed later in the pandemic spent about $100, or 6 percent, less than households surveyed earlier, reflecting corresponding differences in average income…
Waar is beter dorp in Zuid Africa dan Stellenbos?’
In 1825, an unnamed Stellenbosch official paused his tax collection duties to pen a poem in the margins of the opgaafrol. His verses capture the frustrations of colonial administration but the records themselves–annual tax censuses spanning 1685 to 1844–offer a far richer window into the Cape Colony’s social and economic history. First established by the Dutch East India Company and later maintained under Batavian and British rule, the opgaafroll…
Wheat productivity in the Cape Colony in 1825
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 variation within districts. We perform various tests to explain this large variation. We find, surprisingl…
Legacies of loss
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 that experienced the shock albeit these effects are usually small and mostly confined to older coho…
The settlers' fortunes
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 settler societies. This paper uses newly transcribed household-level tax censuses from the Dutch and Brit…
Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom
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 how much we can learn by asking unexpected questions such as 'How could a movie embarrass Stalin?', 'W…
Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom
Tourism falls apart
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 combines information on the number of tourist arrivals in African countries with information on three…
The Settlers of South Africa
The arrival of European settlers in the mid-17th century at the southern tip of Africa profoundly affected the region’s development. They quickly displaced the local Khoesan and began a process of colonization that would, some might argue, continue until 1994 with the first democratic elections, 342 years after their arrival. This is the story of their migration into the Southern African interior. Combining a rich historiography with new quantita…
Living standards in settler South Africa, 1865–1920
Marriage in the Mother City
As a social institution that permeates almost all societies, marriage trends and \npractices are studied across the social sciences. Yet South African marriages, \npast and present, remain understudied, notably because of a lack of adequate \nsource material. This paper contributes to a better understanding of marriage \ntrends in the South African past by offering a new dataset of more than 55 000 \nmarriages solemnized in the Anglican church of…
A tale of paper and gold
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 of state capacity. South Africa, and southern Africa more generally, has remained on the periphery …
Macroeconomic history in South Africa
When Simon Groot died in 1688 on his Stellenbosch farm – leaving behind his wife, Gertrud Baumann, and their two daughters, aged 6 and 18 months – his probate inventory recorded the collection of h
The missing boys
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 literature has almost completely overlooked. The reasons are still not completely clear. Although se…
The growth and diversity of the Cape private capital market, 1892–1902
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 No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is kn…
Health inequality and the 1918 influenza in South Africa
When Cape slavery ended
These oppressions won’t cease
No abstract available
Black Disenfranchisement in the Cape Colony, c.1887–1909
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 wi…
Coffee, Slavery and a Tax Loophole
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 suggests another, more intriguing, reason: a tax loophole in the coffee trade which made it possible for …
The impact of mega-sport events on tourist arrivals
The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony
How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652-1795). This article shows that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable…
Impending Ruin' or 'Remarkable Wealth'? The Role of Private Credit Markets in the 18th-Century Cape Colony
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 what an active credit market could contribute to the economy: for them, borrowing was a sure sign of…
Numeracy of A fricans, A sians, and E uropeans during the early modern period
The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrains investigations into the long‐run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in the developing world. Using the reported ages of criminals in the Court of Justice records in the C ape A rchives, this article documents for the first time numeracy levels and trends for inhabitants of the C ape C olony born between the late seventeenth and early nin…
Settler skills and colonial development
The institutional literature emphasizes local conditions in explaining divergent colonial development. We posit that this view can be enriched by an important supply-side cause: the skills with which the settlers arrive. The Huguenots who arrived at the Cape Colony in 1688/9, we argue, possessed skills different from those of the incumbent farmers, and this enabled them to become more productive wine-makers. We demonstrate this by showing that th…
The Missing People
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative invest…
Ethnic reunion and cultural affinity
A History with Evidence
The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule at the Cape. What emerges from the study is a society characterised by severe inequality, with a relatively (and increasingly) poor farming population comb…
When Cape slavery ended
The Data Revolution in African Economic History
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 regions where written records are scarce, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The digitization of large numbers …
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
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 Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project…
Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel
CITATION: Rijpma, A., Cilliers, J. & Fourie, J. 2020. Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 53(2):112-129. doi:10.1080/01615440.2018.1517030
When selection trumps persistence. The lasting effect of missionary education in South Africa
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The Internationalization of Economic History
The internationalization of economic history is everywhere except in the publication outputs. Using a new dataset of publications in the top four economic history journals, we investigate this puzzle and attempt to explain why relatively few papers on and from developing countries are published in top journals despite the growing internationalization of economic history more broadly. We find little evidence to suggest that this is due to a bias a…
The economics of apartheid
Twenty years after apartheid was formally abolished it continues to shape South African society. Its legacy persists over and above interest in it as a perverse phenomenon. We therefore find it timely, as part of our introduction to this special issue, to review some important studies of the economic aspects, and particularly some newer research by young scholars. Since so much about the apartheid system remains unexamined, Economic Research Sout…
The transmission of longevity across generations
Luxury product consumption in eighteenth-century Cape Colony households
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Legacies of loss
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 that experienced the shock albeit these effects are usually small and mostly confined to older coho…
Health inequality and the 1918 influenza in South Africa
The effect of safety and security issues on international tourism
Who Writes African Economic History
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 an increase in papers on Africa, it has included little work by Africans. I then attempt to explain …
Interracial marriages in twentieth-century Cape Town
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 of this section shall be void and of null effect’. We use more than 23,000 newly-transcribed Anglican…
Literacy at South African Mission Stations
Measures of education quality – primarily, years of schooling or literacy rates – are widely used to ascertain the contribution of human capital formation to long-run economic growth and development. This article, using a census of 4,678 mission station residents, documents literacy and numeracy rates of non-white citizens in nineteenth-century South Africa. The 1849 census allows for an investigation into how the mission stations influenced the …
New Estimates of Settler Life Span and Other Demographic Trends in South Africa, 1652–1948
To date, very little is known about the demography of European settlers in South Africa, since descriptions have been based on Ross's 1975 calculations of a small sample of 300 observations in the Cape Colony. In this paper we provide a broader and deeper account, using a dataset drawn from the Genealogical Institute of South Africa (2008) that includes information on 401,602 observations of settlers in South Africa and spans the period 1652 to 1…
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for …
Explaining ship traffic fluctuations at the early Cape settlement 1652–1793
The first Europeans to settle in South Africa arrived in 1652 to establish a halfway station for ships sailing between Europe and the East Indies under the command of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The settlement was intended as a place of recovery for VOC ships and sailors and, perhaps more importantly, as a source of fresh produce for passing ships. Consequently, it is not surprising that historical descriptions of the early Cape Colony co…
The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for …
A History with Evidence
The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule at the Cape. What emerges from the study is a society characterised by severe inequality, with a relatively (and increasingly) poor farming population comb…
The impact of mega-sport events on tourist arrivals
The Future of South African Economic History
Significant progress has been made recently in South African economic history, but much work remains to be done. In the pages that follow we set out a few potential paths of analysis based on developments within the broader discipline at the level of both methodology and theory. We highlight some of the more interesting developments and then offer suggestions as to how they could open up new avenues of exploration within the South African context
New Estimates of Settler Life Span and Other Demographic Trends in South Africa, 1652–1948
To date, very little is known about the demography of European settlers in South Africa, since descriptions have been based on Ross's 1975 calculations of a small sample of 300 observations in the Cape Colony. In this paper we provide a broader and deeper account, using a dataset drawn from the Genealogical Institute of South Africa (2008) that includes information on 401,602 observations of settlers in South Africa and spans the period 1652 to 1…
The Roots of Development
South Africa, as the cradle of humankind, is a most appropriate setting for the launch of this supplementary issue of Economic History of Developing Regions, themed The Roots of Development. Economic history is a fertile field, its promise evident in the abundance of its methods, techniques and approaches. But it must also remain relevant
Luxury product consumption in eighteenth-century Cape Colony households
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The transmission of longevity across generations
Ethnic reunion and cultural affinity
The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony
How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652-1795). This article shows that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable…
The Quantitative Cape
The digitisation and transcription of rich archival sources and the use of statistical techniques combined with modern computing power have, over the last decade, enabled social scientists to reinterpret eighteenth-century Cape history. This review article summarises the main findings from the burgeoning literature, assesses whether these new studies refute or support earlier hypotheses, shows how new quantitative evidence can inform our understa…
The Internationalization of Economic History
The internationalization of economic history is everywhere except in the publication outputs. Using a new dataset of publications in the top four economic history journals, we investigate this puzzle and attempt to explain why relatively few papers on and from developing countries are published in top journals despite the growing internationalization of economic history more broadly. We find little evidence to suggest that this is due to a bias a…
The economics of apartheid
Twenty years after apartheid was formally abolished it continues to shape South African society. Its legacy persists over and above interest in it as a perverse phenomenon. We therefore find it timely, as part of our introduction to this special issue, to review some important studies of the economic aspects, and particularly some newer research by young scholars. Since so much about the apartheid system remains unexamined, Economic Research Sout…
Numeracy of A fricans, A sians, and E uropeans during the early modern period
The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrains investigations into the long‐run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in the developing world. Using the reported ages of criminals in the Court of Justice records in the C ape A rchives, this article documents for the first time numeracy levels and trends for inhabitants of the C ape C olony born between the late seventeenth and early nin…
Literacy at South African Mission Stations
Measures of education quality – primarily, years of schooling or literacy rates – are widely used to ascertain the contribution of human capital formation to long-run economic growth and development. This article, using a census of 4,678 mission station residents, documents literacy and numeracy rates of non-white citizens in nineteenth-century South Africa. The 1849 census allows for an investigation into how the mission stations influenced the …
Settler skills and colonial development
The institutional literature emphasizes local conditions in explaining divergent colonial development. We posit that this view can be enriched by an important supply-side cause: the skills with which the settlers arrive. The Huguenots who arrived at the Cape Colony in 1688/9, we argue, possessed skills different from those of the incumbent farmers, and this enabled them to become more productive wine-makers. We demonstrate this by showing that th…
When selection trumps persistence. The lasting effect of missionary education in South Africa
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The Missing People
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative invest…
The Historically High Cost of Tertiary Education in South Africa
On Friday 23 October 2015, South African president Jacob Zuma announced that university tuition fees will not increase in 2016. The decision was reached after a meeting that day between the preside
The Data Revolution in African Economic History
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 regions where written records are scarce, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The digitization of large numbers …
Poor South Africa! Will No Nice English People Ever Come Out Here?’ The South African Constabulary of the Anglo-Boer War
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 service terms. We also match these attestation records to the discharge records for each recruit, pro…
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
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 Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project…
Impending Ruin' or 'Remarkable Wealth'? The Role of Private Credit Markets in the 18th-Century Cape Colony
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 what an active credit market could contribute to the economy: for them, borrowing was a sure sign of…
Economics (30 obras) · Geography (30 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Cape (24 obras) · History (22 obras) · Archaeology (21 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (21 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (20 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Economic growth (17 obras)