The Economics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis

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Introduction

Slavery is occasionally described as a "peculiar institution", developing in relation to exceptional cultural and social conditions. Yet, and as rightly highlighted by Engerman, it is wage labour rather than slave labour that is peculiar in the history of mankind.¹Slavery is one among several forms of labour emerging from historically specific but not "exceptional" conditions of production and factor markets. The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis²has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. The hypothesis states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery (or bonded labour) became a vital alternative means to increase production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The use of slaves and bonded labour was also widespread. Logically, the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has also been employed by a number of economic historians and historians to analyse the role of slavery in Africa. The hypothesis is not, however, uncontested. A number of scholars have criticized the hypothesis on both theoretical and empirical grounds.³

This article critically discusses the validity of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis using the eighteenth-century Cape Colony as an empirical point of departure. By doing so, it will also revise previous research on slavery in the Cape and provide an alternative analysis of its trajectory. A lack of reliable data on labour input and land size prevents us from drawing any definite conclusions based on quantifiable data. Instead, the article uses a wide range of different sources, quantitative and qualitative, to unpack the economics of slavery in the Cape (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

The historic boundary of the Cape Colony and modern provincial boundaries of the Western Cape.

Source: Johan Fourie, "The Remarkable Wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony: Measurements from Eighteenth-Century Probate Inventories", The Economic History Review, 66 (2013), pp. 419-448.

Focusing on wine and wheat settler farming in the south-western Cape, more specifically the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein districts, where the use of slaves was widespread in the eighteenth century, this article considers the extent to which slave use can be explained by the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis and argues...