Running Towards: Labour Market Incentives for Runaway Slaves in the British Cape Colony, 1830–1838

Recent scholarship on slave escapes has increasingly emphasised economic motivation, but few studies have empirically investigated how market incentives influenced the decision-making of enslaved individuals during transitions from coerced to wage labour. This paper fills that gap by exploring whether runaway slaves at the British Cape Colony were driven by the desire to improve their labour market opportunities as slavery gave way to emancipation. To answer this question, we construct a novel dataset of 689 runaway advertisements published between 1830 and 1838, drawn from two major colonial newspapers, and link these records to individual-level valuations compiled at the time of de jure emancipation in December 1834. Using both difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity in time analyses, we find that escapes increased markedly among higher-valued, more productive enslaved individuals immediately after de jure emancipation, rising by over 100 per cent relative to the pre-emancipation average. These escape attempts gradually declined, however, as de facto emancipation approached in 1838. Our results suggest that enslaved individuals responded rationally to shifts in labour market conditions, challenging the conventional view of escape as solely a reaction to harsh treatment. By quantifying the relationship between institutional change and labour coercion, this paper contributes directly to theoretical debates on how market incentives shape behaviour under conditions of economic unfreedom.