Inequality in the Cape Colony, 1685–1844: New Measures, New Evidence

South Africa has one of the highest levels of inequality globally. This paper shows that such inequality is not a recent development. Using several newly transcribed datasets from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cape Colony, I calculate historical wealth inequality across different groups and regions. The sources – including tax censuses, probate inventories, slave valuation rolls and Khoe mission settlement records – offer rare insight into the structure of preindustrial society, allowing for comparisons over time and across settler, enslaved and Khoe households. I go beyond the Gini coefficient by computing the Theil index, the Palma ratio and bootstrapped confidence intervals. The results reveal persistently high levels of within-group inequality and highlight the concentration of productive resources across all groups with available data. The corrected basket Gini for the Stellenbosch-Drakenstein district rises from approximately 0.74 in the 1690s to approximately 0.89 by the late eighteenth century, before dipping slightly in the early nineteenth century; the Theil index peaks above 3.6 in the late eighteenth century before falling sharply; and the Palma ratio reaches extreme values – exceeding 3,000 in some decades – revealing a large assetless population. Including enslaved people as zero-asset households pushes the Gini above 0.95, comparable to Caribbean slave economies. In international perspective, the Cape Colony ranks among the most unequal preindustrial societies for which quantitative evidence exists. The evidence suggests that severe economic inequality has long been a defining feature of South African society.