The causes of the poor white problem, first noted at a Dutch Reformed Church Synod in 1886, were unclear; many blamed the inadequate education system, urbanisation, cheap wages or cultural factors, while others argued that external events such as the rinderpest disease or the Anglo-Boer war...

Recent remarks in the media suggest that the Currie Cup competition, the premier rugby union competition in South Africa, is in need of a revamp. This is not a new inclination; the structure of the Currie Cup has had numerous alterations over the preceding two decades. But why has the Currie Cup...

World service exports have grown at a rapid rate over the past few decades. While some countries have benefited from the surge in service exports, others have been left behind. This paper provides a snapshot of the current state of trade in services using three measures of the Balassa index to...

Trade is a critical component of economic growth in newly settled societies. This paper tests the impact of ship traffic on the Cape economy using a time series smoothing technique borrowed from the business cycle literature and employing an econometric procedure to test for long-run...

The South African government has begun to ramp up economic infrastructure investment. This is an important policy shift and in line with the government’s aim of increasing economic growth to 6% and halving poverty by 2014. It follows that we are left with the question: What are the most...

Against the backdrop of shifting views on the role of government in the provision of infrastructure, this paper distinguishes between the payment for and financing of the South African Government’s infrastructure investment programme. The paper also presents a classification system that...

Using newly digitized and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of the composition of the South African Constabulary, a volunteer force of mostly English recruits during and after the Second South African War. These records contain personal particulars, such as age,...

In the late 1980s Robert Ross and co-author Pieter van Duin reversed the widely accepted view of the Cape economy as a ‘social and economic backwater’ of widespread subsistence farming and overall poverty, scattered with small islands of relatively affluent farmers. Exploring the rich...

New estimates of GDP of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) suggest that the Cape was one of the most prosperous regions during the eighteenth century. This stands in sharp contrast to the perceived view that the Cape was an “economic and social backwater”, a slave economy with slow growth and...

Opsomming: Wat was die gemiddelde trou-ouderdom vir Kaapse mans en vroue in die agtiende en negentiende eeu? Ons vind, deur gebruik te maak van ’n nuwe genealogiese datastel, dat voor die 1850s die mediaan Kaapse setlaarsvrou getrou tussen die ouderdom van 19 en 20 jaar met ’n man wat tussen...