Preliminary Programme

We investigate the distribution of skills before, during and after the mineral revolution that swept through South Africa during the late nineteenth-century. Using the censuses of 1861-1891 for the Cape Colony and 1911-1931 for South Africa, we tabulate the evolution of skills during the period of rapid economic change as a result of the discoveries of diamonds (1867) and gold (1885) in the South African interior. Our results show that economic development resulted in the rise of bimodal skill distribution. In South Africa, this divergence often had a racial bias. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to take the first steps in providing a longitudinal analysis of the occupational structure in colonial and post-colonial Malawi. This includes identifying basic shortcomings and biases in the statistics and suggesting possible solutions to improve and making the data comparable over time and space. Due to the comparatively scattered data in the colonial Blue Books we focus primarily on the developments in the post-war period and onwards.
Malawi is one of the poorest, least diversified and least urbanised economies in the region (World Bank 2015). Malawi’s limited diversification and low urbanisation rate was already in the colonial period recognised as exceptional in an African context (Ketttlewell 1964). This has made scholars to identify strong path dependencies of Malawi’s economic history from 1945 to present.
Meanwhile, there have been significant changes in the economy since the 1950s, i.e. significant fluctuations of migration flows (1950-2010), growth of the public and service sectors (1950-), the rise of African burley tobacco production (1990 -), rise (1950-1985) and decline (1985 – 2005?) of large-scale agricultural production. Occupational time series would in this context offer an opportunity to provide a more complex and empirical grounded understanding of how the economy has developed since the post-war period. The series will be constructed based on four principle sources, namely statistical abstracts (1945-1963) the annual statistical reports (1964-), population censuses (1945, 1966, 1977, 1987, 1998, 2008) and the integrated household surveys (2001, 2005, 2012).
There are a number of challenges using this data. The quality of the data various over time, but more important is what is missing, like tenant labour, unofficial migration and the informal sectors. Furthermore, the sources do not recognise that people often combined several occupations (e.g. farm and off-farm work). The paper will address these issues and identify strategies forward. (Show less)

In recent years several scholars have made important contributions to better our understanding of the demographic, economic and labour history of Africa (Manning, 2010; Austin 2007, 2008; Frankema and Jerven, 2014; Fourie and Green, 2014; Lane, 2014; Pallaver, 2014; Pilossof, 2014; Vos, 2014; among others). Little is, however, still known about the history of occupational structures in Sub-Saharan Africa and their overtime changes and continuities. To help filling in this gap in the scholarship and facilitate comparatives studies across different African countries and regions, as well as broader comparisons across the global south, in this paper we will reconstruct the occupational structure of twentieth-century Mozambique.
Firstly, we will survey the source materials available, highlighting their potential for this research and discussing their main methodological challenges. Secondly, we will reconstruct the occupational structure of Mozambique per decade, identifying and analyzing the most significant shifts and continuities in view of the country’s dominant economic sectors, its urbanization process and mobility and migration patterns. Our analysis will be based on Mozambican censuses data and various surveys carried out by international and non-governmental organizations. (Show less)