IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rehdxx/v28y2013i1p87-108.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Wealth Of Cape Colony Widows: Inheritance Laws And Investment Responses Following Male Death In The 17th And 18th Centuries

Author

Listed:
  • Dieter von Fintel
  • Sophia Du Plessis
  • Ada Jansen

Abstract

Losing a household member is usually negatively associated with welfare, especially if that person is a breadwinner. Coping methods include disposal of assets to generate cash flow, while other households increase their labour supply. This paper considers a specific case in a pre-industrial society, presenting evidence where male mortality was associated with distinct benefits for widows. In the Cape Colony (during the Dutch East India Company occupation), Roman Dutch inheritance laws favoured widows, who were then able to set up households independently of their children. Their sizable inheritances (relative to other heirs) enabled investment in production assets with otherwise prohibitively high fixed costs (in particularly slave labour and vineyards) and resulted in divestment from other non-productive assets. While the mortality shock would presumably have had negative impacts on income and subsistence crop levels, this was not the case in the Cape: instead, reconstructed asset portfolios set widows up for productive, slave intensive farming and subsequent status and affluence.

Suggested Citation

  • Dieter von Fintel & Sophia Du Plessis & Ada Jansen, 2013. "The Wealth Of Cape Colony Widows: Inheritance Laws And Investment Responses Following Male Death In The 17th And 18th Centuries," Economic History of Developing Regions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(1), pages 87-108, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:28:y:2013:i:1:p:87-108
    DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2013.805512
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2013.805512
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/20780389.2013.805512?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrei Shleifer & Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Rafael La Porta, 2008. "The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(2), pages 285-332, June.
    2. Johan Fourie & Dieter von Fintel, 2010. "A History with Evidence: Income inequality in the Dutch Cape Colony," Working Papers 23/2010, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    3. Wayne Twine & Lori Mae Hunter, 2011. "Adult mortality and household food security in rural South Africa: Does AIDS represent a unique mortality shock?," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(4), pages 431-444, October.
    4. Stefan Dercon, 2002. "Income Risk, Coping Strategies, and Safety Nets," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 17(2), pages 141-166, September.
    5. Michael Grimm, 2010. "Mortality Shocks and Survivors’ Consumption Growth," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 72(2), pages 146-171, April.
    6. Fourie, Johan & von Fintel, Dieter, 2010. "The Fruit of the Vine? An Augmented Endowments-Inequality Hypothesis and the Rise of an Elite in the Cape Colony," WIDER Working Paper Series 112, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    7. Johan Fourie & Dieter von Fintel, 2010. "The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society: the case of the Cape Colony," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 4(3), pages 229-267, October.
    8. Bruce Sacerdote, 2005. "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(2), pages 217-234, May.
    9. Ada Jansen & Dieter von Fintel & Sophia du Plessis, 2013. "Slave Prices and Productivity in the 18th Century at the Cape of Good Hope: The Winners and Losers from the Trade," Working Papers 385, Economic Research Southern Africa.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Auke Rijpma & Jeanne Cilliers & Johan Fourie, 2020. "Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(2), pages 112-129, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Johan Fourie & Dieter Fintel, 2014. "Settler skills and colonial development: the Huguenot wine-makers in eighteenth-century Dutch South Africa," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(4), pages 932-963, November.
    2. Piraino, Patrizio & Muller, Sean & Cilliers, Jeanne & Fourie, Johan, 2013. "The transmission of longevity across generations: The case of the settler Cape Colony," SALDRU Working Papers 113, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    3. Sophia du Plessis & Ada Jansen & Dieter von Fintel, 2014. "Slave prices and productivity at the Cape of Good Hope from 1700 to 1725: did all settler farmers profit from the trade?," Working Papers 17/2014, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics, revised 2014.
    4. Johan Fourie & Jan Luiten Zanden, 2013. "GDP in the Dutch Cape Colony: The National Accounts of a Slave-Based Society," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 81(4), pages 467-490, December.
    5. Baulia, Susmita, 2024. "Is household shock a boon or bane to the utilisation of preventive healthcare for children? Evidence from Uganda," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    6. Johan Fourie, 2011. "Slaves as capital investment in the Dutch Cape Colony, 1652-1795," Working Papers 21/2011, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    7. Ekama, Kate & Fourie, Johan & Heese, Hans & Martin, Lisa-Cheree, 2021. "When Cape slavery ended: Introducing a new slave emancipation dataset," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    8. Links, Calumet & Green, Erik & Fourie, Johan, 2018. "Was Slavery a Flexible Form of Labour? Division of Labour and Location Specific Skills on the Eastern Cape Frontier," African Economic History Working Paper 42/2018, African Economic History Network.
    9. Jörg Baten & Johan Fourie, 2015. "Numeracy of Africans, Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: new evidence from Cape Colony court registers," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(2), pages 632-656, May.
    10. Gutiérrez-Romero, Roxana & Ahamed, Mostak, 2021. "COVID-19 response needs to broaden financial inclusion to curb the rise in poverty," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    11. Mariya Aleksynska & Giovanni Peri, 2014. "Isolating the Network Effect of Immigrants on Trade," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(3), pages 434-455, March.
    12. Mebratie, Anagaw D. & Sparrow, Robert & Yilma, Zelalem & Alemu, Getnet & Bedi, Arjun S., 2015. "Enrollment in Ethiopia’s Community-Based Health Insurance Scheme," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 58-76.
    13. Mehmet Maksud Onal & John K. Ashton, 2021. "Is the Journey more Important than the Destination? EU Accession and Corporate Governance and Performance of Banks," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(6), pages 1516-1535, November.
    14. Lo Turco, Alessia & Maggioni, Daniela & Zazzaro, Alberto, 2019. "Financial dependence and growth: The role of input-output linkages," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 308-328.
    15. Sébastien Marchand, 2012. "Legal Origin, Colonial Origins and Deforestation," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 32(2), pages 1653-1670.
    16. Kumar, Sanjesh & Singh, Baljeet, 2019. "Barriers to the international diffusion of technological innovations," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 74-86.
    17. Osei-Tutu, Francis & Weill, Laurent, 2023. "Individualism reduces borrower discouragement," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 211(C), pages 370-385.
    18. Mahmud, Mahreen & Riley, Emma, 2021. "Household response to an extreme shock: Evidence on the immediate impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on economic outcomes and well-being in rural Uganda," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    19. Graziella Bertocchi, 2016. "The legacies of slavery in and out of Africa," IZA Journal of Migration and Development, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 5(1), pages 1-19, December.
    20. Girardone, Claudia & Kokas, Sotirios & Wood, Geoffrey, 2021. "Diversity and women in finance: Challenges and future perspectives," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:28:y:2013:i:1:p:87-108. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rehd20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.