Employing recently assembled wage and price data, this paper sketches the long-term development of real wages at the Cape of Good Hope, from its foundation in 1652 up to the unification of South Africa in 1910. The results show that real wages were consistently above subsistence level, and...

This paper offers time-series of urban unskilled labor wages and commodity prices in eight British African colonies (1880-1940) and shows that real wages were above subsistence level and rising, especially during the interwar years. Real wages in West Africa and Mauritius were even considerably...