Occupational Mobility during South Africa's Industrial Take‐Off

• Author: Johan Fourie,Jeanne Cilliers
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/saje.12177

OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY DURING SOUTH AFRICA’S

INDUSTRIAL TAKE-OFF

JEANNE CILLIERS*AND JOHAN FOURIE

†

Abstract

In the absence of historical income or education data, the change in occupations over time can

be used as a measure of mobility. This paper investigates intergenerational occupational mobility

using a novel genealogical dataset for settler South Africa, spanning its transition from an agricul-

tural to an early industrialised society (1800-1909). We identify fathers and sons for whom we

have complete information on occupational attainment. We follow a two-generation discrete

approach to measure changes in both absolute and relative mobility over time. Consistent with

qualitative evidence of a shift away from agriculture as the economy’s dominant sector, we see

the farming class shrinking and the skilled and professional classes growing. Controlling for

changes in the structure of the labour market over time, we find increasing mobility, becoming

significant after the discovery of minerals in 1868. We find this mobility particularly for semi-

skilled workers but virtually no improved mobility for sons of farmers. We also test hypotheses

related to the mobility prospects for first-born sons and sons of immigrants.

JEL Classification: J60; J61; J62; N30; N37

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility, occupational mobility, resource curse, industrialisation,

colonialism

1. INTRODUCTION

We measure white occupational mobility before and during South Africa’s industrial

take-off. For much of the nineteenth century, the territories that made up South Africa

were largely agricultural. The coastal cities of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the

only manufacturing centres. This changed with the discovery of diamonds in 1867, and

gold 20 years later, which shifted the locale of economic power from the south-eastern

coast to the northern interior. We know that the mineral revolution resulted in ethnic

inequalities, benefiting mostly whites (Bundy, 1979), but we do not really know who the

main economic beneficiaries were.

This is important because industrialisation produces both winners and losers. The dis-

coveries of minerals in the interior South Africa attracted migrants from across Southern

Africa and beyond. Infrastructure, notably railways, roads and telegraph lines, began to

connect the interior with South Africa’s ports. South Africa rapidly integrated into the

global economy (Boshoff and Fourie, 2017). But not everyone benefited from this. As

Herranz-Loncan and Fourie (2017) show, railways allowed Cape wheat farmers access to

the boom towns of the interior. Basotho farmers, though, lost their preferential access.

There were other negative shocks too. To name one example, by the end of the century,

* Corresponding author: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Economic History, Lund Uni-

versity, Lund, Sweden. E-mail: jeanne.cilliers.7367@ekh.lu.se

†

LEAP, Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University.

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C2017 Economic Society of South Africa. doi: 10.1111/saje.12177

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South African Journal of Economics Vol. 86:1 March 2018

South African Journal

of Economics

a prolonged colonial war fought as a consequence of the mineral revolution, devastated

large parts of the South African interior.

Using a sample of father-son pairs from a novel dataset of genealogical records, we

make the first attempt to measure the intergenerational occupational mobility of white

South Africans during this period of rapid industrialisation. It is said that industrialisa-

tion will maximise the efficiency of human capital by putting the “right man in the right

place,” advancing “on the basis of what he could do rather than who he was or whom he

knew” (Landes, 1969:10). The consequence was that people would be stratified not by

ascription at birth but by personal achievement (Hoogvelt, 1978). But structural changes

in the labour market by definition cause intergenerational occupational mobility.

Absolute mobility is defined as mobility resulting from said changes in the structure of

the labour market. Relative mobility, on the other hand, is intergenerational occupational

mobility that is net of these changes. Relative mobility can have various causes, such as a

reduction of the barriers to mobility, an expansion of the educational system offering

new opportunities to the less affluent, the diminishing importance of social networks or

the changing formal and informal institutions of the society.

Both measures, absolute and relative, provide a description of changes in the relation-

ship between occupations across generations and the share of individuals who remain

immobile or end up in different classes from their parents; in other words, an overall

change in social structure. Measures of intergenerational occupational mobility, however,

do not necessarily give us a picture of improvements in living standards from generation

to generation. Because there can be considerable variation in income and wealth within

occupations, in the absence of occupational mobility there may still be substantial

income or wealth mobility.

Our findings contributes to four important literatures. The first is the literature on

social and occupational mobility, to which we contribute new historical evidence of one

set of beneficiaries of South Africa’s mineral revolution: semi-skilled labourers, who were

mainly middle-class urban whites (Keegan, 1986; Van Onselen, 2001). Poor whites seem

to have largely been left behind. Because we have no evidence on the occupational

mobility of black South Africans during this period yet, we recognise that our finding

may be partly a result of the downward (relative) mobility of black farmers into unskilled

occupations. But, as we show, not all white South Africans were socially mobile: industri-

alisation in South Africa did not turn white farmers into factory-workers. We find that

sons of white farmers were less occupationally mobile than the sons of unskilled and

semi-skilled white labourers. It would seem that in agriculture, ascription by birth

continued to trump personal achievement, even after the onset of industrialisation.

Instead, farming remained highly ascriptive, and dependent on property rights and land

ownership. In the rapidly changing South Africa of the late nineteenth century,

patrimony, it seems, still mattered.

The second is an emerging literature on intergenerational mobility between and

within countries over the past two centuries (Maas and Van Leeuwen, 2002; Mazumder,

2005; Long and Ferrie, 2007, 2013; Blanden, 2013; Dribe et al., 2015). Almost all these

studies, though, consider the historical intergenerational mobility of present-day devel-

oped countries and for obvious reasons: interest in understanding how these countries

grew prosperous, and availability of data. The United States, Britain and Sweden have

exceptionally rich data sources to support such high-quality empirical work. Our study is

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C2017 Economic Society of South Africa.