The New Economics of Cape Slavery

ABSTRACT

In this survey, I argue that the Cape Colony has become one of the most useful settings for studying the economics of unfree labour. The Cape offers a distinctive combination: a slavery regime linking the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds, an urban and agrarian economy, overlapping labour regimes and archives rich enough for linked micro‐data. Recent work treats slavery as both a labour and an asset regime, reads the Cape against Atlantic plantation economies to separate slavery‐as‐capital from plantation scale and recovers enslaved people's agency as evidence on outside options. The paper sets out five research priorities.