The long run, in numbers

Slavery was abolished at the Cape on 1 December 1834. Project 1834 studies what slavery and emancipation meant for the people of Stellenbosch and for the university that grew up among them. It has three pillars: research on slavery and its aftermath, redress through histories of the university’s farms, and public history.

The project launched in January 2026 with the international conference Global Slavery, Emancipations and the University at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

The Cape Colony’s annual tax censuses, the opgaafrolle, recorded every settler household’s people, crops, livestock and slaves. The Cape of Good Hope Panel transcribes the full series and links households from one census to the next, which makes it one of the longest household panels for any pre-industrial society.

The project is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. It concludes in 2026 with a public release of the data.

For a thousand years travellers to Africa wrote down what they saw: prices, crops, diseases, rulers, roads. Time Traveller treats these diaries and accounts as data. It uses text-as-data methods to measure how Africa’s economies and societies changed, in places and periods for which no statistics exist.

Frontiers of Finance studies how firms, banks and investors built Africa’s financial markets, and where they failed. It works from company registers, share lists and prospectuses, among them the records of the joint-stock companies of the Cape Colony.

The Khoe were the Cape’s first pastoralists and, after colonial settlement, a large share of its farm labour. Colonial records counted them poorly. This project grew out of the Cape of Good Hope Panel. It reconstructs Khoe labour, wages and trade on the Cape frontier and asks how indigenous households responded to the settler economy.

The Chair in Economics, History and Policy deepens research in economic history and carries its insights into public policy and public debate. It starts from the idea that stories and historical narratives shape economic behaviour and policy: as Robert Shiller argues, economic narratives can influence major events such as recessions. Through applied history, the use of historical analogies and lessons, the Chair helps policymakers ground their decisions in historical precedent. This matters most in developing countries, where past policies and economic crises are poorly understood and closer study of history offers real guidance.

Led by Johan Fourie, the Chair works across four themes: publications, pedagogy, policy and public engagement. Through new teaching materials, policy workshops and public outreach, from blogs and podcasts to graphic novels, it connects rigorous historical research with practice and gives decision-makers a long view of today’s problems. Its home for public writing is Our Long Walk, a blog and podcast on the economic history of South Africa and the continent.