In this paper I use primary and secondary sources to quantify the role of tenant labour on settler farms in colonial Africa, using Southern Rhodesia as a case in point. My findings show that the rise of wage labour did not mark the end of labour tenancy, as has been assumed in previous...

Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for children as labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older and more densely populated farming regions. In this paper we...

The lack of secure property rights has been identified by a number of economists - past and present - as an obstacle for long-term growth of output of African farming. The foundation for such a claim is that insecure property rights hinder long-term capital investments. Although the observed...

The Nieboer–Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool to identify the economic conditions under which slavery is more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was more likely to become a vital...

Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups is often missing from colonial records, their presence usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role...

The role of factor endowments and institutions as drivers of socio-economic change and development is a central theme in economic and agrarian history. The common approach is to identify either factor endowments or institutions as triggers of change. Meanwhile, institutions and factor endowments...

The historical role of European farming in southern and central Africa is a delicate matter that has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. Going through this vast literature a striking consensus emerges: success or failure of European farming in southern Africa was to...