The Missing People
Accounting for the Productivity of Indigenous Populations in Cape Colonial History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8980852 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Johan Fourie (0000-0002-7341-017X, Stellenbosch University, corresponding author), E Green (0000-0002-7805-4696, Lund University) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 195-215 |
| Publication date | 2015-06-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s002185371500002x |
| OpenAlex | W1800628988 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 49 |
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 investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in failing to include the Khoesan population, previous estimates have overestimated slave productivity, social inequality, and the level of gross domestic product in the Cape Colony
Agriculture · Archaeology · Biology · Cape · Colonialism · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Livelihood · Population · Productivity · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Demography · Ecology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History
Creating the Cape Colony
Prices and living standards
Governance challenges and unequal access in the commercialisation of honeybush
Paying in Cents, Paying in Rupees
Colonial Elites in The Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony
Wealth and marriage at the Cape
The substitutability of slaves
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy
Wages, Gender, and Coercion
The Voracious Frontier
Institutions for the taking
The Data Revolution in African Economic History
Slavery in Dutch South Africa
The Angry Divide
The Shaping of South African society, 1652-1840
History of Africa south of the Zambesi
History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi, from the Settlement of the Portuguese at Sofala in September 1505 to the Conquest of the Cape Colony by the British in September 1795
The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development
Europe and the people without history
The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society
Jan Paerl, a Khoikhoi in Cape Colonial Society 1761-1851
Good, Bad, and Ugly Colonial Activities
The Quantitative Cape
African Growth Recurring
Missionaries and female empowerment in colonial Uganda
Decentralization and Corruption in Historical Perspective
Happy in the Service of the Company
Growing Tall but Unequal
A History with Evidence
Living Conditions in Côte D'ivoire and Ghana, 1925–1985
The Causal History of Africa
Real wages at the Cape of Good Hope
An early colonial landed gentry
Kraal and Castle
Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965
Colonial taxation and government spending in British Africa, 1880–1940
Towards an Objective Account of Nutrition and Health in Colonial Kenya
Khoisan resistance to the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Population Decline and Delayed Recovery in Bunyoro, 1860–1960
The New Economic History of Africa
The Economics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony
The Making of a Colonial Elite
Children of Bondage
On the shaping of South African society
Land abundance and economic institutions
Introduction
The biological standard of living in early nineteenth-century West Africa
Writing history backwards or sideways
The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony
Settler skills and colonial development
Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760-1803
| Unique citing works | 13 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,3 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 13 |