The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American Republic

Johan Fourie and Frank W. Garmon Jr. ()
Additional contact information
Frank W. Garmon Jr.: Department of Leadership and American Studies, Christopher Newport University

No 05/2022, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. This paper uses newly transcribed household-level tax censuses from the Dutch and British Cape Colony and the United States shortly after independence to show comparative levels of income and wealth over four decades both between the two regions and within them. Cape farmers were, on average, more affluent than their American counterparts. While crop output and livestock were more unequally distributed at the Cape, slave ownership in America was more unequal. There was little indication of an imminent reversal of fortunes.

Keywords: settler economies; comparative development; slavery; inequality; colonies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2022/wp052022/wp052022.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American republic (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers375

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().