Macroeconomic history in South Africa: The South African Reserve Bank centennial special issue

When Simon Groot died in 1688 on his Stellenbosch farm – leaving behind his wife, Gertrud Baumann, and their two daughters, aged 6 and 18 months – his probate inventory recorded the collection of household goods and farm implements that the family had owned at the time: some tin and iron equipment, a gun, and a wagon, to name but a few items. The inventory also lists the summer harvest of ten mudden rye and the livestock on the farm: one pig, two horses, twelve trek oxen, ten cattle and fifty-five sheep. Ownership of one enslaved, unnamed boy is recorded – but what is most remarkable about Groot’s inventory is the family’s credit network: despite their relatively humble portfolio of assets, they owed money to at least fifteen people – including a sizeable sum to the Dutch Reformed Church. In contrast to an earlier literature which suggested a mostly subsistence economy, research using these probate inventories and auction rolls has revealed the dense financial network of the eighteenth-century Cape Colony – a financial network underpinned, it must be emphasized, by the institution of slavery (Fourie and Swanepoel 2018). This fact – a thriving capitalist system blemished by exclusion and exploitation – would become characteristic of South Africa’s economic development into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study of capitalism – the history of markets, entrepreneurship, trade, and innovation but also labour coercion, discrimination, and inequality – is back in vogue. There are at least two reasons for this. First, events in the present have forced social scientists to learn from the past. Macroeconomists, enamoured with rational expectations models, had predicted the end of the business cycle – that was, until the Great Recession of 2007 dashed those predictions. As Eichengreen (2012) reminds us, it is during such financial crises that policymakers turn to history for guidance. Furthermore, the rise of populist movements across the globe during the 2010s has warranted comparisons with earlier eras that also witnessed severe levels of societal inequality (Piketty and Zucman 2014). Forms of exclusion along race and gender identities persist – exclusions that have deep historic roots (Wanamaker 2017). And research on the Spanish flu of 1918 is in high demand in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (Arthi and Parman 2021). A second reason for the rising interest in the study of economic history is the availability of new methods and sources (Mitchener 2015). This is especially applicable to the developing world, where conventional historical sources are often inaccessible or