Erik Green

The economics of slavery in eighteenth century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis

The Nieboer–Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool to identify the economic conditions under which slavery is more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was more likely to become a vital alternative to increase production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and partly colonial Africa. The hypothesis has, however, not remained uncontested. Scholars have criticized it on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This paper discusses the validity of the Nieboer– Domar hypothesis using the eighteenth-century Cape Colony as our point of departure. We show that the hypothesis partly holds but needs modified. First, slavery emerged as an urban phenomenon. Second, the use of slaves increased parallel with other forms of labour and the role of slaves can only be understood in relation to a wide range of existing labour contracts. Once established, slavery came to play a significant role in facilitating increased production on the settler farms in the 18th century. Capacity for surplus production was the key factor, but why slaves became a major form of labour was partly a consequence of its’ pre-existence in the urban areas and partly how it be combine slavery with other forms of labour.

Endogenous processes of Colonial Settlement : The success and failure of European settler farming in sub-Saharan Africa*

This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial settlement critically depended on colonial government policies arranging European farmer’s access to local land, but above all, local labour resources. These policies were shaped by the clashing interests of African farmers and European planters, in which colonial governments did not necessarily, and certainly not consistently, abide to settler demands, as is often assumed.

Was the wage burden too heavy? - Settler farming, profitability, and wage shares of settler agriculture in Nyasaland, c. 1900-60

The historical role of European farming in southern and central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. Going through this vast literature, a striking consensus emerges: the success or failure of European farming in southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonisers’ access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Yet, these propositions have so far never been systematically and empirically tested. This paper is a first attempt to do that by analysing the ‘wage-burden’ European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents, we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments in agriculture, and wages paid for the European tobacco and tea sector in colonial Malawi. Our results contradict both with previous research on settler colonialism in Africa and the historiography of Nyasaland. Our estimates show that settler farming did not collapse in the 1930s as commonly assumed. On the contrary, the value of production on both tobacco and tea farms increased significantly. And so did the settler farmers capacity to capture the profits, manifesting itself by a declining wage share over time. In contrast with previous research we argue that the developments cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies but rather through changes in regional migration patterns, and global commodity markets. Migrations patterns had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour and global commodity markets influenced value of production. Market forces rather than colonial policies shaped the development trajectory of settler farming in Nyasaland. (Less)

The missing people - Accounting for the productivity of indigenous populations in Cape colonial history

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 Khoisan population, previous estimates have overestimated slave productivity, social inequality, and the level of gross domestic product in the Cape Colony. (Less)

The Internationalization of Economic History: Perspectives from the African Frontier

ABSTRACT In an interesting and thought-provoking paper recently published by the Economic History of Developing Regions, Johan Fourie and Leigh Gardner ask why relatively few papers from developing countries have been published in top-ranked economic history journals. They provide a number of tentative answers of which differences in academic traditions between regions seem to be an important one. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by putting the identified puzzle in the broader context of the development of economic history in the Western world and African universities. We fear that the silence from African scholars in top-ranked economic history journals might lead economic historians in the Western world to believe that little economic history research is taking place at African universities. The paper shows that economic history research at African universities is not only strong, but remained vibrant even when African economic history was on the decline at universities elsewhere. The lack of visible output in major economic history journals is thus not a sign of weakness. Instead it is an effect of the increased methodological specialization of economic history in the Western world. There is a danger that this specialization may led to regional isolation and we thus urge economic historians in the Western world to further engage in the work by African scholars.

State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Labour Relations: The case of Lilongwe Land Development program in Malawi, 1968-1981

This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of contradictory forces set in motion by the programme itself. The LLDP enabled a larger segment of farmers to engage in commercial agriculture, which caused a decline in supplies of local labourers ready to be employed on a casual or permanent basis. Increased commercial production was thus accompanied by a de-commercialization of labour relations, which hampered the scope for better-off farmers to increase yields by employing additional labourers. By using both written and oral sources, this article thus provides an empirical case that questions the conventional view that increased cash-crop production in twentieth-century rural Africa was accompanied by a commercialization of labour relations. It concludes that the history of rural labour relations cannot be grasped by simple linear models of historical change, but requires an understanding of local contexts, with a focus on farming systems and factors that determine the local supply of and demand for labour.

Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi

Abstract: This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanovs notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrarian doctrine to be revealed. Calls for changes of local institutions did not signify attempts to promote rural transformation, but contained strategies to increase the economic independence of the precapitalist family farm.

Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and Inequality?

The formalisation of customary land rights in Africa, as an alternative to their privatisation, is gaining increasing attention from scholars and policy makers. In this article, we use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010. Based on interviews with farmers, chiefs and the Alliance, we argue that the certificates have reinforced, rather than reversed, both commodification of land and increased inequality of access to land. The main reason is that the certificates provide chiefs and lineage seniors with an efficient tool to further impose institutionally induced scarcity, thereby failing to provide already vulnerable groups with more secure rights to land.

Coping with the Double Crisis: Lake Chilwa Recession and the Great Depression on Chisi Island in Colonial Malawi, 1930–1935

Environmental history is to a large extent framed by the neoclassical principle of generalized scarcity that recognizes that nature changes, both independently and in response to human actions, and thus changes the context in which human history unfolds (McNeill 2003). At the same time, political ecology puts more emphasis on power and inequalities as direct drivers of scarcity (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2012). However, both approaches can enhance our understanding of the influences acting upon coping strategies during resource scarcity. During the 1930s, people in the Lake Chilwa Basin in Malawi had to cope with both the drying up of Lake Chilwa and the global economic depression. We chose to describe this confluence on Chisi Island as the ‘double crisis,’ and it may at first glance seem obvious, but on examination becomes quite complex. In the case of the Lake Chilwa, the colonial administration introduced cotton production on the dry lake bed to boost the economy of Nyasaland in the face of the economic depression. However, the people of Chisi Island successfully resisted cotton farming. The ‘double crisis’ illustrates how power-relations shape scarcity and vice versa. Environmental scarcity is understood as the decrease in quantity and quality of renewable resources caused by three main processes: i) environmental changes; ii) population increase; and iii) unequal social distribution of resources, also termed ‘structural scarcity’ (de Sherbinin and Dompka 1998). Scarcity therefore becomes a naturally recurring limitation on the availability of resources or goods within an ecological system affecting the organization and functioning of societies. Economic historians, for example, argue that land-labor ratios have had a lasting impact on inequality and power relations because the use of slavery and/or bonded labor has historically been more common in geographical areas of land abundance and labor scarcity (Austin 2008; Green 2014). Environmental historians address degradation associated with non-renewable resources, environmental change associated with human transformation of renewable resources and environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and preservation (Hughes 2001; Worsted 1993). Similarly, a key feature of African environmental historiography is its emphasis on the conservationist paradigm of managing scarcity of natural resources (Kwashirai 2012; Mulwafu 2010). Political ecologists have criticized the environmental scarcity framework for neglecting inequality and power relations. Political ecologists emphasize that power and politics determine access to and distribution of specific resources and thus have the potential to create scarcity for the society at large * Joseph Nagoli Joseph.Nagoli@slu.se

Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel

ABSTRACT 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 is now in its fourth year. Here we describe the history of the project, the transcription process, and present some preliminary results.