THE LAND-LABOUR HYPOTHESIS REVISED: WEALTH, LABOUR AND HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION AT THE SOUTH AFRICAN FRONTIER

Jeanne Cilliers () and Erik Green ()
Additional contact information
Erik Green: Department of economic history, Lund University

No 34/2017, African Economic History Working Paper from African Economic History Network

Abstract: Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for children as labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older and more densely populated farming regions. In this paper we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet district in South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1800-28. We show that the number of children present in farming households increased with frontier closure, while the presence of non-family labourers decreased over time. We explain this by, differently from the frontier literature, acknowledging that the demand for family labour was not a function of its marginal productivity and that farmers reacted to differently to diminishing land availability depending on their wealth. Poorer households, which made up the majority of this frontier population, responded to shrinking land availability by employing relatively more family labour, while the wealthiest group underwent capital intensification.

Keywords: South Africa; household composition; agriculture; labour; pre-industrial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 N37 N57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2017-07-13
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hhs:afekhi:2017_034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in African Economic History Working Paper from African Economic History Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Erik Green ().