‘An attempt to study the inventory of alternatives’
Latest working papers
- Histories that matter: The case for applied economic history (with Chris Colvin) | QUB Working Paper
- Running Towards: Labour market incentives for runaway slaves in the British Cape Colony, 1830–1838 (with Karl Bergemann and Gabriel Brown)
- Counter-Elite Mobilization and Settler Colonialism: The Structure of Contestation in the Cape Colony, 1779 (with Jonathan Schoots)
Overview
I did not choose economic history; it chose me. It began, improbably, with a paper on ship traffic at the Cape and a Lisbon conference audience of three. There I met the economic historian Jan Luiten van Zanden and that conversation sent me to Utrecht University to do a PhD in Economic History. I completed it in 2012, using probate inventories and the Cape tax censuses to study the nature, causes, and distribution of wealth in the eighteenth-century Cape Colony.
That early work left me with a bias that still shapes everything I do: if you want to understand how societies change, you need evidence that is granular enough to surprise you. Quantitative records can do that. They can also puncture comfortable myths. In my case, the probate inventories and tax censuses made it hard to sustain the old story of a uniformly poor settler society.
The Cape of Good Hope Panel project is a direct descendant of that realisation. It is an ambitious effort to transcribe the full series of the opgaafrolle and to turn them into a household panel that can be followed over time, and, when matched to genealogies, across generations. The aim is not just a bigger spreadsheet. It is a new research infrastructure for South African history – one that can support questions we could not ask before, or could only ask impressionistically.
What have we learned so far? Two things can be true at once. The Cape was, on average, a wealthy society by the standards of its time, and it was also a severely unequal one. My work using probate inventories and tax censuses shows that many settler farmers were well-off, even in comparison to some of the wealthiest societies of the period. But the same sources also reveal how sharply that prosperity was distributed, within and between groups. And once you can measure wealth at the household level, the questions become harder, and better: how did elites maintain their advantage; which factors made mobility possible; what did “opportunity” mean in a society built on unfree labour.
The richness of the Cape records also makes it possible to widen the lens beyond the usual protagonists. Some of my work has tried to recover histories of people who are often absent from conventional archives, precisely because their lives were not written down in the places historians tend to look. It is not archival cosplay. It is an attempt to make the evidentiary base of South African history more representative, and therefore more useful.
Because of this interest in Africa’s past, I was pulled early into the African Economic History Network, founded in 2011. That community has shaped my research in two ways. First, it has kept me honest about parochialism. South Africa is endlessly interesting, but it is not the whole story. Second, it pushed me to think about who gets to write economic history, and which skills and incentives determine who participates. In my own writing I have argued that the “data revolution” in African economic history is real, but unevenly distributed, and that building capacity on the continent is part of the scholarly job.
More recently, my attention has shifted from building datasets and answering historical questions to thinking harder about how economic history can matter for the present. With Chris Colvin, I define applied economic history as the systematic, context-sensitive use of historical reasoning to illuminate contemporary policy problems – not by offering ready-made lessons, but by disciplining the analogies and narratives that policymakers and the public already use. Instead of beginning with a historical episode and asking why it happened, an applied approach starts with a current problem and works backwards, testing which parallels illuminate and which mislead.
This is also where my role as Chair in Economics, History and Policy comes in. My research uses extensive historical records and quantitative analysis to investigate the drivers of societal change in South African history, with an eye on what that can contribute to economic theory and policy-making now. The past does not provide a blueprint. It does provide an inventory of alternatives, and a way to argue about trade-offs with more humility and more evidence than the usual policy advice allows.
Recent grants and awards
| Year | Grant / award | Grant number | Funder / body | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Chancellor’s Award: Social Impact | - | Stellenbosch Unviersity | - |
| 2025-2027 | The Cape of Good Health? Death, disease and development disparities in the Cape Province, 1912 | CPRR240403211840 | South African National Research Foundation | PI |
| 2025 | Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom graphic novel | #8644 | Emergent Ventures | PI |
| 2024 | Interdisciplinary Research Prize | - | Stellenbosch University | Director |
| 2024 | Top Researcher Award | - | Stellenbosch University | - |
| 2021–2026 | Cape of Good Hope Panel project | M20-0041 | Riksbankens Jubileumsfond | Co-PI |
| 2018–2022 | Biography of an Uncharted People project | - | Mellon Foundation | PI |
Selected publications
Google Scholar has a complete list of my publications.
- Fourie, Johan. 2025. “Inequality in the Cape Colony, 1685–1844.” South African Journal of Science 121 (11-12): 71–79. Paper | Code
- Fourie, Johan, Erik Green, Auke Rijpma, and Dieter Von Fintel. 2025. “Income Mobility Before Industrialization: Evidence from South Africa’s Cape Colony.” Social Science History 49 (1): 22–51. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, Erik Green, Christiaan Burger, Chris de Wit, Kate Ekama, Jan Greyling, Hans Heese, Jan-Hendrik Pretorius, Robert Ross, and Dieter von Fintel. 2025. “‘Waar Is Beter Dorp in Zuid Africa Dan Stellenbos?’: What the Stellenbosch-Drakenstein Tax Censuses Reveal.” South African Historical Journal 76 (4): 420–46. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Johannes Norling. 2025. “Household Spending During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 55 (3): 369–413. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Johannes Norling. 2024. “Women’s Employment in the United States After the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.” Essays in Economic & Business History 42 (1): 38-58. Paper
- Fourie, Johan. (ed.) 2023. Quantitative History and Uncharted People: Case Studies from the South African Past. Bloomsbury Publishing. Edited book
- Maravall, Laura, Jörg Baten, and Johan Fourie. 2023. “Leader Selection and Why It Matters: Education and the Endogeneity of Favouritism in 11 African Countries.” Review of Development Economics 27 (3): 1562–1604. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Frank Garmon Jr. 2023. “The Settlers’ Fortunes: Comparing Tax Censuses in the Cape Colony and Early American Republic.” The Economic History Review 76 (2): 525–50. Paper
- Martins, Igor, Jeanne Cilliers, and Johan Fourie. 2023. “Legacies of Loss: The Health Outcomes of Slaveholder Compensation in the British Cape Colony.” Explorations in Economic History 89: 101506. Paper
- Fourie, Johan. 2022. Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History. Cambridge University Press. Book
- Marco-Gracia, Francisco J, and Johan Fourie. 2022. “The Missing Boys: Understanding the Unbalanced Sex Ratio in South Africa, 1894–2011.” Economic History of Developing Regions 37 (2): 128–46. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, Kris Inwood, and Martine Mariotti. 2022. “Living standards in settler South Africa, 1865–1920.” Economics & Human Biology 47: 101158. Paper
- De Kadt, Daniel, Johan Fourie, Jan Greyling, Elie Murard, and Johannes Norling. 2021. “Correlates and Consequences of the 1918 Influenza in South Africa.” South African Journal of Economics 89 (2): 173–95. Paper
- Ekama, Kate, Johan Fourie, Hans Heese, and Lisa-Cheree Martin. 2021. “When Cape Slavery Ended: Introducing a New Slave Emancipation Dataset.” Explorations in Economic History 81: 101390. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Jonathan Jayes. 2021. “Health Inequality and the 1918 Influenza in South Africa.” World Development 141: 105407. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, Kris Inwood, and Martine Mariotti. 2020. “Military technology and sample selection bias.” Social Science History 44 (3): 485-500. Paper
- Von Fintel, Dieter, and Johan Fourie. 2019. “The Great Divergence in South Africa: Population and Wealth Dynamics over Two Centuries.” Journal of Comparative Economics 47 (4): 759–73. Paper
- Mpeta, Bokang, Johan Fourie, and Kris Inwood. 2018. “Black Living Standards in South Africa Before Democracy: New Evidence from Height.” South African Journal of Science 114 (1-2): 1–8. Paper
- Herranz-Loncán, Alfonso, and Johan Fourie. 2018. “‘For the Public Benefit’? Railways in the British Cape Colony.” European Review of Economic History 22 (1): 73–100. Paper
- Fourie, Johan. 2016. “The Data Revolution in African Economic History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 47 (2): 193–212. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Erik Green. 2015. “The missing people: Accounting for the productivity of indigenous populations in Cape colonial history.” The Journal of African History 56 (2): 195–215. Paper
- Baten, Joerg, and Johan Fourie. 2015. “Numeracy of Africans, Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: New evidence from Cape Colony court registers.” The Economic History Review 68 (2): 632–56. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Dieter von Fintel. 2014. “Settler skills and colonial development: The Huguenot wine-makers in eighteenth-century Dutch South Africa.” The Economic History Review 67 (4): 932–63. Paper
- Fourie, Johan. 2014. “The quantitative Cape: A review of the new historiography of the Dutch Cape Colony.” South African Historical Journal 66 (1): 142–68. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2013. “GDP in the Dutch Cape Colony: The national accounts of a slave-based society.” South African Journal of Economics 81 (4): 467–90. Paper
- Fourie, Johan. 2013. “The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony: Measurements from eighteenth-century probate inventories.” The Economic History Review 66 (2): 419–48. Paper
- Boshoff, Willem H., and Johan Fourie. 2010. “The significance of the Cape trade route to economic activity in the Cape Colony: A medium-term business cycle analysis.” European Review of Economic History 14 (3): 469–503. Paper
- Fourie, Johan, and Dieter von Fintel. 2010. “The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, pre-industrial society: The case of the Cape Colony.” Cliometrica 4 (3): 229–67. Paper