Cliometrics in South Africa¹

1 I would like to thank Willem H. Boshoff, Sophia du Plessis, Bokang Mpeta, Dieter von Fintel, the students of the 2018 postgraduate History class and seminar participants at the Stellenbosch Forum (28 June 2018) for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I apologise for any remaining errors of omission. The research reported here would not have been possible without support from the Department of Economics, the Faculty of Economic and Management Science's Elite Fund, and the National Research Foundation.

Abstract

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 questions remain. This paper reviews the most recent contributions, several of which are published in this special issue, and surveys the road ahead.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Willem H. Boshoff, Sophia du Plessis, Bokang Mpeta, Dieter von Fintel, the students of the 2018 postgraduate History class and seminar participants at the Stellenbosch Forum (28 June 2018) for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I apologise for any remaining errors of omission. The research reported here would not have been possible without support from the Department of Economics, the Faculty of Economic and Management Science's Elite Fund, and the National Research Foundation.

2 A collective term for the pastoral Khoe and hunter-gatherer San who inhabited the south-western region of southern Africa when Europeans arrived.

3 See Trapido (1990, p.78).

4 White women only received the franchise in 1930, and coloured voters were finally removed from the voters’ roll in the Cape Province in 1951.

5 See Mariotti and Fourie (2014) for a detailed review.

6 Two examples are the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Biography of an Uncharted People project (www.unchartedpeople.org) and the Cape of Good Hope Panel project (www.capepanel.org), a collaborative project between Stellenbosch University and Lund University.