What we know about the material culture of eighteenth century Cape Colony settlers is mostly limited to qualitative evidence found in official documents, letters, travel accounts and other correspondence. This paper uses a new quantitative source – the MOOC probate inventories – to ascertain...

Although Van Riebeeck already produced the first wine at the Cape in 1659, the arrival of French Huguenots during 1688/89 gave considerable impetus to Cape wine production. The reasons for this remain unclear. By using quantitative production data over more than a century of European settlement,...

The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule...