The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony

ABSTRACT

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 the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax datasets (1805–1828) to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. We find that slave labour, indigenous labour and settler family labour were not substitutable over the period of the study. This lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. Indigenous khoe labour and slave labour remain complements throughout the period of the study even when khoe labour becomes scarce after the frontier conflicts. We argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was due to the settlers’ need to acquire labourers with location-specific skills such as the indigenous khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than as a source of unskilled labour, such as for artisan skills or for collateral.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• labour
• indigenous
• complements
• substitutes
• skills
• collateral
• Africa

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been written without the transcription efforts of Linda Orlando and Chris de Wit, and the kind support of Erika le Roux at the Cape Archives. More information about the Cape of Good Hope Panel project is available at: www.capepanel.org. We thank Gareth Austin, Jeanne Cilliers, Igor Martins, Heinrich Nel, Auke Rijpma, Robert Ross and Dieter von Fintel for their valuable input. All errors, of course, remain those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The transcription of these records is part of the ongoing Cape of Good Hope Panel project (Fourie and Green 2018). Visit http://www.capepanel.org (accessed 10 June 2019) for more information.

2 The price data obtained to calculate the values for cattle and sheep are taken from the MOOC8-series probate inventories as indicated later in this paper. This approach is taken from Fourie and Von Fintel (2010) which made use of MOOC-10 auction price information.

3 The Graaff-Reinet district itself consist of various sub-districts including Graaff-Reinet town, Agter-op-Sneeuwberg (behind Snowy mountain), the Agter-op-Rhinocterberg (behind Rhinoceros mountain), the Zuurberg, Buffelshoek, the Camdeboo, Zwartruggens, Ghoup, Nieuweveldt, the Lower and Upper Zeekoei rivier, the Hantam, Zwartberg, the Winterveldt, Uitvlug and Swaggershoek.

4 A field-cornetcy was a district under the jurisdiction of a field-cornet (veldkornet ), who was a local government official or military officer.

5 Stock-farming was not new to the area, however. On the contrary, the area had been utilized for stock farming for more than 2000 years (Keay-Bright and Boardman 2006) by indigenous khoe.

6 The services of knechts (ie, European wage workers) were also utilized on farms; however, their contribution to the pastoral eastern colonial economy remained negligible.

7 Agricultural goods that required some manufacturing, such as wine and brandy, are included in the opgaafrollen.