ABSTRACT The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax datasets (1805–1828) to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. We find that slave labour, indigenous labour and settler family labour were not substitutable over the period of the study. This lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. Indigenous khoe labour and slave labour remain complements throughout the period of the study even when khoe labour becomes scarce after the frontier conflicts. We argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was due to the settlers’ need to acquire labourers with location-specific skills such as the indigenous khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than as a source of unskilled labour, such as for artisan skills or for collateral.

中文翻译：

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奴隶的可替代性：来自开普殖民地东部边境的证据

摘要奴隶劳动经济制度的可替代性通常被认为是给定的。除了为再培训奴隶而进行的一些资本投资外，从根本上说，他们的劳动可以代替任何其他形式的劳动。本文通过对南非海角殖民地东部边境上的格拉夫-里内特地区的纵向研究提出了质疑。我们计算横截面税数据集（1805-1828年）的22年组合中每一年的互补系数的希克斯弹性，以检验奴隶劳动是否可替代其他形式的劳动。我们发现，在研究期间，奴隶劳动，土著劳动和定居家庭劳动不能被替代。这使人们相信奴隶和家庭劳动是农业生产中的两种不同投入的发现。在整个研究过程中，即使在边境冲突后当地的劳动力短缺，土著的hoe头劳动和奴隶劳动仍是互补。我们认为，奴隶劳动的不可替代性是由于定居者需要获得具有特定地点技能的劳动力，例如土著k，而奴隶的目的可能不是作为非熟练劳动力的来源，例如技巧或抵押。