‘Unobtrusively into the ranks of colonial society’: Intergenerational wealth mobility in the Cape Colony over the eighteenth century

ABSTRACT

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 mechanisms to explain our results. Our data allow us to match at much higher rates than before, and also include daughters. We find very high mobility at the Cape and, in contrast to the existing historiography, higher rates for those at the bottom of the wealth distribution.

Keywords:

• intergenerational mobility
• wealth
• Cape Colony

Notes

2 Groenewald (2011: 39) attributes Jacob van Reenen’s success to ‘vast landholdings and major involvement in the meat pacht or lease for several decades’ and Wagenaar (1976) demonstrates that this success was achieved before he reached 20 years of age.

3 Similarly, intergenerational social mobility studies the correlation between father’s social status and child’s social status. Social mobility is defined as the change in child’s social status not explained by the father’s social status, while persistence in social status is the correlation between father and child’s social status.

4 Most studies of this kind consider mobility only between fathers and sons because the change in daughters’ surnames after marriage makes it difficult to link the records. Ideally we would like to add mothers as well, but the nature of the data does not allow for this.

5 For information on the land ownership systems and property rights, see Swanepoel and Fourie 2018a.

6 It is important to note that the father’s debts were not carried over to his children but paid out of the estate before the inheritances were paid to the children. Our measurement of debt is the total value of the father’s accumulated debt as captured in the probate inventories and the corresponding debt value of the son or daughter.

7 These codes are references to the probate inventories. MOOC is the abbreviation for Master of Orphan Chamber, who kept the probate records at the Cape; 8 refers to the series of probate records, 23 is the volume and 3 the number of the inventory in the volume.

8 Current-day Latvia.

9 The pacht system gave certain individuals monopoly rights to provide goods to the Company and Cape Town market.

10 Note that here was no inflation during this era. Du Plessis and Du Plessis (2012) find decreasing prices over the eighteenth century. We use nominal prices throughout the study, since prices do not affect the results.

11 More information is available at www.jeannecilliers.com/south-african-families-database (accessed 25 February 2018).

12 In the first step, the name, surname and death date of the individual were used to find exact matches across data sets. The remaining, inexact, entries were manually linked. Where information on children in the household was available, this was also used to ensure the matching between the two sources was correct. Swanepoel and Fourie (2018a) offer more information on the matching process, together with a comparison between the matched and unmatched inventories in our samples.

13 The number of farms is the most accurate measure of land in the probate inventories. Given the open frontier and the ease with which new land was obtained, this is, however, not a perfect measure.

14 To achieve a natural logarithm value, the zero wealth variables were replaced with $1\times 10e^{-10}$. The results remain robust whether these values are included or not.

15 For this reason, the gender interaction is removed from Table 3.