Three lessons from the 18th-century Cape

On non-neutral data, markets that are social, and inequality

In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a 19th-century taxman. But the poem survives only because the bureaucracy did.

Year after year, from the 1660s to the 1840s, local officials appointed by the Dutch East India Company and, after 1806, the British colonial government, recorded settler households, their harvests and their labour obligations in ledgers known as _opgaafrolle_ (tax censuses). Read closely, these records provide fleeting glimpses of lived experience; taken together, they allow us to trace long-term social and economic dynamics.

We often treat the past as distant. But the 18th-century Cape Colony also serves as an experiment for current-day economic historians in state capacity, market trust and inequality. Those themes remain central to South Africa today, and to the experience of many African economies shaped by colonial institutions.

Over the past year, my team and I at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past at Stellenbosch University have published three studies that return to the Cape’s archival record with new data and new methods. Together, they suggest three lessons that still resonate: the non-neutrality of administrative data; how markets are social as well as economic institutions; and how inequality endures.