In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a 19th-century taxman. But the poem survives only because the bureaucracy did.
Year after year, from the 1660s to the 1840s, local officials appointed by the Dutch East India Company and, after 1806, the British colonial government, recorded settler households, their harvests and their labour obligations in ledgers known as opgaafrolle (tax censuses). Read closely, these records provide fleeting glimpses of lived experience; taken together, they allow us to trace long-term social and economic dynamics.
We often treat the past as distant. But the 18th-century Cape Colony also serves as an experiment for current-day economic historians in state capacity, market trust and inequality. Those themes remain central to South Africa today, and to the experience of many African economies shaped by colonial institutions.
Over the past year, my team and I at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past at Stellenbosch University have published three studies that return to the Cape’s archival record with new data and new methods. Together, they suggest three lessons that still resonate: the non-neutrality of administrative data; how markets are social as well as economic institutions; and how inequality endures.
1. Data is never neutral
The opgaafrolle were fiscal instruments, introduced under Dutch East India Company rule in the second half of the 17th century and maintained under Batavian and British administrations in the early 19th century. Their purpose was straightforward: to record who lived where, what they owned, what they produced and what could be taxed.
In a paper co-authored with colleagues and students, we analyse the complete series of tax censuses for Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, two of the earliest and wealthiest districts of the Colony, close to Cape Town, between 1685 and 1844. These records allow us to trace kinship networks, marriage patterns, changes in agricultural output and the evolution of slave ownership over nearly 160 years.
The Cape was a slave economy. Enslaved people, brought from territories across the Indian Ocean, were recorded as assets in settler households. Indigenous Khoesan people are not included in these records, although there is little doubt that they, too, worked on settler farms. They are traced in later records.
For this study, we simply wanted to know what these detailed records, unique for their time, revealed about life at the Cape. We found they could be used to understand not only the economy, but also social life. For example, surnames showed marriage patterns that preserved wealth within the family.
The broader lesson is that data – in this case, administrative data – is never neutral. Some things are never recorded, like the Khoesan workers on farms. And when things are recorded, they can easily be biased, for a variety of reasons. Cape farmers underreported production to reduce their tax burden, for example. Enslaved people, by contrast, were recorded with far greater consistency in the censuses, partly because “owners” were not required to pay a slave tax.
Any serious engagement with administrative data, past or present, therefore requires attention to incentives and institutions. This is particularly important as South Africa today debates policy using census and administrative data whose limitations are often poorly understood. There are real consequences for planning and accountability.
2. Markets are social institutions before they are economic ones
Tax records tell us what households declared about their productive activities. To understand more about their consumption, we need different sources.
In another paper, we turn to the Cape Orphan Chamber’s auction records. These auctions were held when estates were liquidated, often after a death, and they recorded who bought what, at what price, and from whom. The dataset covers the period from 1701 to 1825 and has recently been fully transcribed.
What emerges is a picture of markets embedded in social relationships. Auctions were public events. Family members often bid on household goods to keep them within the family or to support widows and children. Credit – borrowing to invest in new tools or to acquire enslaved people – flowed along kinship lines. Consumption – buying an ox, or a wagon, or a Bible – was a public signal of status, belonging and obligation.
This matters for contemporary Africa. Economic policy often treats markets as anonymous spaces where prices alone coordinate behaviour. Yet across much of the continent, markets still operate through trust and reputation. For example, one recent study shows African firms in historically pastoral regions remain smaller, partly because pastoralists are less likely to trust those outside the immediate family.
Even today, credit access, business partnerships and labour arrangements remain deeply relational. The Cape’s auctions remind us that markets have always been social institutions and that ignoring this leads to poor policy design.
3. Inequality is not a modern deviation but a historical constant
South Africa’s extreme inequality is often attributed to 20th-century industrialisation, apartheid policy and post-apartheid failures. While all of these matter, they do not tell the full story.
In another paper, I measured inequality in the Cape Colony between 1685 and 1844. The study used an expanded set of tax censuses, as well as probate inventories – lists of assets that people owned when they died – and slave valuation rolls – the lists created to compensate slave owners during the period of emancipation.
Wealth was highly unevenly distributed from the earliest periods of settlement. Today the situation would be described as severe inequality.
Even if we only consider settlers (and exclude enslaved and Khoesan inhabitants), wealth was very skewed. A small elite owned most productive resources.
Even more surprising, similar patterns appear in the limited records we have for Khoesan settlements.
In other words, wealth was severely unequally distributed not only between groups but also within.
This perspective forces us to rethink how we talk about inequality today. If inequality has deep historical roots, then it cannot be understood simply as a recent malfunction of modern capitalism, nor fixed by narrow technical adjustments to tax rates or social transfers.
Inequality, in other words, is not an anomaly to be corrected back to some imagined baseline of equality, but a recurring outcome of how societies organise power and production. That does not make severe inequality morally acceptable, but it does shift the policy question. The relevant issue is not whether inequality exists, but whether those at the bottom are becoming less poor and are more able to move up.
Looking back to think forward
The 18th-century Cape Colony does not offer ready-made policy solutions. What it offers is perspective. It shows how states govern through what they can observe and record, how markets operate through social ties as much as prices, and how inequality can persist across centuries.
The frustrated tax collector in Stellenbosch could not have imagined that his tax records would one day inform debates about governance, markets and inequality. Yet they can. They remind us that the past continues to shape the constraints within which policy is made, and the possibilities for change.
Johan Fourie receives funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
