No abstract

The Cape Colony is an interesting case for debates on the long-term economic development of Europe's former colonies. Yet there is no agreement on how to assess the Cape's long-term economic growth trajectory. Consensus has thus far been hindered by the lack of a consistent overall growth measure. This paper contributes by calculating real wages for the Cape, from its foundation in 1652 up to the unification of South Africa in 1910, using wage and price data from a wide variety of sources. The results nuance two contrasting views on the Cape's eighteenth century growth. It is shown that the early nineteenth century was a relatively dynamic period, while the real wage data do not support the 'traditional' view of a clear economic take-off after 1870.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets.

The development of living standards in Java has long been a subject of scholarly interest. A number of scholars have suggested that between  and  Southeast Asian living standards declined significantly. The present article contributes to these issues by calculating long-term real wages for Java between  and , following Allen's subsistence basket methodology. New data on wages and prices were collected from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives and connected to data on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resultant long-term real wage developments show a slightly different picture of Javanese living standards than that which has emerged from the literature to date.

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.