THE MISSING PEOPLE: ACCOUNTING FOR THE
PRODUCTIVITY OF INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS IN
CAPE COLONIAL HISTORY*
Johan Fourie
Stellenbosch University
Erik Green
Lund University
Abstract
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing
from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative
estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eight-
eenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, de-
spite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative
investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of
Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape
Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler
expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over
time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove
the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in
failing to include the Khoesan population, previous estimates have overestimated slave pro-
ductivity, social inequality, and the level of gross domestic product in the Cape Colony.
Key Words
South Africa, economic, labour, inequality, slavery, indigeneity.
African economic history has undergone an impressive revitalization over the past decade.
What is significant about this body of scholarly work is the systematic use of quantitative
data to shed new light on the African past.
One strand of this renaissance of research uses
* We thank Anton Ehlers, Di Kilpert, Robert Ross, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Dieter von Fintel, Nigel Worden,
seminar participants at Stellenbosch University and Lund University, the staff of the Cape Town Archives
Repository, and four anonymous referees of this journal for helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this
article. We are grateful to Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA) for financial support and for
publishing an earlier version of this article as Working Paper No. , and for a research grant from the
Southern African-Nordic Centre (SANORD). Authors’ email: johanf@sun.ac.za; Erik.Green@ekh.lu.se
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Journal of African History, (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press
doi:./SX