The growth and diversity of the Cape private capital market, 1892–1902
Lloyd Melusi Maphosa,
Anton Ehlers,
Johan Fourie and
Edward M. Kerby
Economic History of Developing Regions, 2021, vol. 36, issue 2, 149-174
Abstract:
The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is known about the people who financed them. This study is an enquiry into who they were. Using a list of 6883 shareholders from 263 companies, we show that the Cape’s sources of private capital were a diverse group of people. Unlike previous studies, we find that most capital came from the middle class at the Cape and very little from foreign investors. The paper contributes to our understanding of early financial developments on the frontier and the evolution of capitalism at the Cape. It also contributes broadly to the economic and business history of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cape.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347 (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:taf:rehdxx:v:36:y:2021:i:2:p:149-174
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rehd20
DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347
Access Statistics for this article
Economic History of Developing Regions is currently edited by Alex Klein and Alfonso Herranz-Loncan
More articles in Economic History of Developing Regions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().