Numeracy of Africans, Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: new evidence from Cape Colony court registers
Joerg Baten and
Johan Fourie
Economic History Review, 2015, vol. 68, issue 2, 632-656
Abstract:
type="main">
The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrains investigations into the long-run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in the developing world. Using the reported ages of criminals in the Court of Justice records in the Cape Archives, this article documents for the first time numeracy levels and trends for inhabitants of the Cape Colony born between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century: the native Khoesan, European settlers, and imported slaves from other African regions and Asia. This variety of origins allows us to compare contemporaneous levels of early modern development across three continents. By isolating those slaves born at the Cape, we also provide a glimpse into the dynamics of human capital transfer in a colonial setting. The Colony's relatively high level of human capital overall had implications for what was later to be the richest country on African soil, but the very unequal attainment of numeracy also foreshadowed extreme income inequality.
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1468-0289.12064 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
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:bla:ehsrev:v:68:y:2015:i:2:p:632-656
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0117
Access Statistics for this article
Economic History Review is currently edited by Stephen Broadberry
More articles in Economic History Review from Economic History Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().