Wealth and Marriage at the Cape: Consanguineous Unions as a Strategy

Summary, in English

Marriage is among the most fundamental social relationships undergirding the transmission of cultural norms and family property. How marital partnerships are formed is of considerable interest to a broad range of social scientists, particularly when and whether partners are sought from within the family or from the outside. We study the relatively high levels of cousin marriage characteristic of European settler families in the Cape Colony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, using a unique linked data sample that combines marital choices with information on taxable wealth, and frontier settlement. This permits us to test two common explanations for cousin marriage in the European demographic literature, a wealth-consolidation strategy versus a geographic isolation hypothesis. We find no evidence of cousin marriages facilitating differential wealth consolidation in the next generation, suggesting that if this was a deliberate strategy to accumulate wealth, it was not a very successful one.

• Author: Erik Green; Jeanne Cilliers; Auke Rijpma; Anne E. McCants
• Department/s: Department of Economic History; Economic development of the Global South
• Publishing year: 2025
• Language: English
• Pages: 258-284
• Publication/Series: The History of the Family
• Volume: 30
• Issue: 2
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2025.2478381
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Topic: Economic History
• Keywords: Consanguinity; marriage strategies; wealth preservation; isolation; colonial frontier
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1873-5398