Browsing by Author "Cilliers, Jeanne"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Cape Colony marriage in perspective
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Cilliers, Jeanne; Fourie, Johan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Economics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Despite the importance of studying marriage patterns for a better understanding of colonial life, the subject has received little attention from a purely economic perspective. In his seminal work, European Marriage Patterns in Perspective (1965), J. Hajnal introduces the notion of a European Marriage Pattern (EMP) emerging in the late Middle Ages which became characteristic of Western European society in the early modern period. Hajnal points out several distinct aspects to distinguish Western European marriages from all other societies of the time. While existing literature in this field has typically focussed on the demographic features of marriage patterns, such as the average age of marriage, the share of the population that had never married, and the effects of the EMP on fertility and resulting population growth, little attention has been paid to the underlying mechanisms and causes of the EMP. Using genealogical records to track the ancestry of colonial settlers in South Africa, this study will investigate the evolution of marriage in the Cape Colony. The focus is primarily on the persistence of the EMP and attempt to determine whether it continued to characterise the marriages of European descendents outside of Europe, or whether a distinct marriage pattern emerged in the Cape Colony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It will explore the effect that such patterns may have historically had on family size, standards of living and life chances for European settlers at the Cape, with an aim to shed new light on the underlying causes of the EMP, by critically evaluating De Moor and van Zanden’s (2010) three hypotheses of the origins of this distinct marriage pattern.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Die huwelikspatrone van Europese setlaars aan die Kaap, 1652 - 1910
    (Pretoria : Human Sciences Research Council, North-West University, 2014-07) Fourie, Johan; Cilliers, Jeanne
    The Cape Colony at the southernmost tip of Africa, founded in 1652 with the arrival of European sailors and soldiers under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, provides, we believe, an excellent opportunity to investigate the persistence of “European” demographic characteristics outside of North-Western Europe, given that it’s social and cultural institions originate from this region. In addition, the Cape has perhaps one of the most well documented settler populations in the world, and the wealth of quantitative archival evidence available allows for new demographic research at a micro level. This study makes use of one such quantitative source: the newly-digitised South African Genealogical Registers, a detailed account of all European settler families at the Cape, to provide new estimates of settler marriage patterns from European settlement to unification in 1910. Why is an understanding of marriage patterns important? A recent literature has emphasised the role of women’s agency in Europe as a key determinant of the rise of a market society and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution (Diebolt and Perrin 2013; Voigtländer and Voth 2013). Women’s agency arose as a result of an increase in the age at which women married during the earlymodern era in Europe, also known as the European marriage pattern (EMP), which was, according to De Moor and Van Zanden (2010), caused by three related factors: 1) consensus in the marriage decision, 2) the Roman-Dutch inheritance laws which ensured that women were given an equal share in the estate of their deceased husbands, and 3) the rise of an active labour market which gave women between the ages of 12 and 25 the opportunity to earn wage income. These three factors, claim De Moor and Van Zanden (2010), explain a divide within Europe along an imaginary line, first observed by John Hajnal and therefore also known as the Hajnal line, running from St Petersburg in Russia to Trieste in Italy; those regions west of the line exhibited characteristics of the EMP, those east of the line did not. The consequences of a higher age of marriage was that the period during which women were fertile within the marriage shortened, resulting in lower fertility rates. A higher age of marriage also meant that both men and women gained additional time to earn an income and improve their skills before marriage. This rise in human capital, argue De Moor and Van Zanden (2010), was a key building block of the rise of a market society and, later, the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. The aim of this article, then, is to provide a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth century marriage pattern estimates for the Cape Colony that allow us to view Cape development in a comparative perspective and, perhaps more tentatively, test whether the same factors that De Moor and Van Zanden (2010) propose, are also true at the Cape. From both quantitative and qualitative sources we find no evidence that a European Marriage Pattern developed at the Cape, even though both consensus in marriage and inheritance laws were present. However, more quantitative evidence is necessary to confirm or refute the De Moor and Van Zanden (2010) hypothesis.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2019-02) Rijpma, Auke; Cilliers, Jeanne; Fourie, Johan
    In this article, we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787–1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84% of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.